1059 
9 

py l 



The Doctrine of Formal 
Discipline 



BY 

C. K. LYANS 



A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF 
CLARK UNIVERSITY. WORCESTER, MASS., IN PARTIAL 
FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE 
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, AND ACCEPTED 
ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF WILLIAM H. BURNHAM 



Reprinted from the Pedagogical Seminary 
September, 1914, Vol XXI, pp. 343-393 



.14 



The Doctrine of Formal 
Discipline 



C. K. LYANS 



A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF 
CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, MASS., IN PARTIAL 
FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE 
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, AND ACCEPTED 
ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF WILLIAM H. BURNHAM 



Reprinted from the Pedagogical Seminary 
September, 1914, Vol XXI, pp. 343-393 






Jai*erstty 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 



By C. K. Lyans, Clark University 



An attempt to discuss the doctrine of formal discipline finds 
itself balked at the very outset by the question : " What is 
formal discipline?" The literature on the subject shows a 
great variety of definitions, but one division between writers 
comes out with special clearness : those who attack the doc- 
trine have a very different definition of it than have those 
who defend it. The result is that the opposing sides in the 
controversy have failed to clash : dispute has tended to 
magnify their apparent differences, and has minimised their 
real points of agreement — and there has been great confusion. 

To clear the field, I shall take first the definition of the 
doctrine as seen by its foes, and as seen by its friends, and 
seek from a comparison of the two views to determine what 
the controversy has really been about. 

( I ) As seen by its foes : Two things have especially occu- 
pied the attention of those who attack formal discipline — 
they have seen in it a doctrine that training is transferable, 
and have found its basis in the faculty psychology. Also, 
they have seen it as a doctrine having much to do with 
the selection of studies, and little to do with the pedagogy 
of instruction : it is to them the weapon of the formalist, 
used to defend subjects that have lost practical utility. Hen- 
derson defines it as meaning " the supposed effect of study 
upon the mind, entirely apart from the content of what is 
learned." Monroe reiterates the definition, but amplifies it 
much further. According to him, the doctrine teaches that 
" a particular activity or experience, especially of an intel- 
lectual character, if well selected, produces a power or ability 
out of all proportion to the expenditure of energy therein : 
a power that will be serviceable in most dissimilar experi- 
ences or activities, that will be available in every situation, 
that will be applicable to the solution of problems presented 
by any subject, however remote from the one furnishing 
the occasion for the original disciplinary experience." (16, p. 
508.) His discussion, again, is followed by Graves (10, vol. 2, 
p. 309). Since all agree, however, in citing Locke as the 



344 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

first writer who clearly formulated the disciplinary concep- 
tion for education, especially in his " Conduct of the Under- 
standing," we have in that work a basis for criticism of 
such definitions as that just quoted from Monroe. There- 
fore, before touching on the views of contemporary defenders 
of formal discipline, I shall give a brief analysis of Locke's 
doctrines : 

(2) As seen by its friends, Locke's " Conduct of the 
Understanding " contains, though in a rather unsystematic 
way, some treatment of nearly every factor of the learning 
process recognized by the most recent psychologists — even to 
the influence of the attitude or ' set.' We may note the 
doctrines most significant for our purpose under five heads : 

(a) Reasoning. Good reasoning, says Locke, demands a 
large, sound, roundabout sense, " conversation with many 
sorts of men, contact with many sorts of books and notions. 
If one would reason soundly, he should " take a taste of 
every sort of knowledge : it is certainly very useful and neces- 
sary to form the mind." 

(b) Improvability of functions. Under this heading comes 
a statement of what Thorndike calls the laws of use and 
disuse : Of disuse, " The great number is of those whom the 
ill habit of never exerting their thoughts has disabled." (1, p. 
207.) Of use, " We are born with faculties and powers 
capable of almost anything, such at least as would carry us 
farther than can easily be imagined, but it is only the exer- 
cise of those powers which gives us ability and skill in any- 
thing." (i,p. 190.) He emphasizes, however, the specific char- 
acter of training — which is the more significant because there 
was no controversy over the question of specific vs. general 
training, in his day, and therefore any but a very careful 
thinker or writer would have been pretty sure to use gen- 
eralizations which would seem to ignore the specific nature 
of training, no matter how thoroughly he himself believed 
that improvement of functions does not transfer. Never 
having encountered any other view, he might quite naturally 
take for granted that no other view was held, and feel no 
need of going into particulars. But Locke did go into par- 
ticulars. He points out that we learn to dance only by prac- 
tice in dancing; to think by thinking; and, indeed, that even 
such a seemingly innate quality as ready wit in conversation 
is very much the result of practice, " to be raised to that 
pitch only by repeated actions." (1, p. 191.) 

(c) Transfer. Yet Locke does teach that training may 
transfer, although he has emphasized its original, specific 
character. This comes out strongest in the case of mathe- 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 345 

matics, where he even uses the term " transfer." He says 
children should be taught mathematics so that " having got 
the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the 
mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of 
knowledge as they have occasion." But he sees clearly that 
this transfer may work for evil as well as good : "A meta- 
physician will bring plowing and gardening immediately to 
abstract notions, the history of nature shall signify nothing 
to him." And again, " Some men have so used their heads 
to mathematical figures, that giving a preference to the 
methods of that science, they introduce lines and diagrams 
into their study of divinity or politic inquiries, as if nothing 
would be known without them." (i, p. 221.) It is precisely 
because too wide a transfer of one type of mental habit 
ensues from a one-sided education, that Locke insists on a 
many-sided education. He insists — to repeat a quotation 
already given above — that one should " take a taste of every 
sort of knowledge; it is certainly very useful and necessary 
to form the mind." He warns against the uselessness and 
danger of having only a smattering of everything, and points 
out the necessity of mastering one's own particular subject, 
but for one who heeds these warnings, " the end and use 
of a little insight in those facts of knowledge which are not 
a man's proper business, is to accustom our minds to all 
sorts of ideas, and the proper ways of examining their habi- 
tudes and relations. This gives the mind a freedom, and the 
exercising the understanding in the several ways of inquiry 
and reasoning which the most skilful have made use of, 
teaches the mind sagacity and wariness, and a suppleness 
to apply itself more closely and dexterously to the bents and 
turns of the matter in all its researches. Besides, this uni- 
versal taste of all the sciences, with an indifferency before 
the mind is possessed with any one in particular, and grown 
in love and admiration of what is made its darling, will 
prevent another evil very commonly to be observed in those 
who have from the beginning been seasoned only by one 
part of knowledge. Let a man be given up to the con- 
templation of one sort of knowledge, and that will become 
everything. The mind will take such a tincture from a 
familiarity with that object, that everything else, how remote 
soever, will be brought under the same view." (1, p. 215.) 

(d) Attitude. The quotations already given are sufficient 
to illustrate Locke's position concerning the attitude or " set " 
and many more quotations could be given, for his doctrine 
on this point pervades and colors his whole treatise. He 
recognizes that one pursuing a given subject develops an 



346 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

attitude appropriate to that subject; that one whose edu- 
cation, being confined to one subject, has provided him with 
but one attitude, will apply that attitude to all subjects, from 
not having learned a better mode of attack; and therefore 
it is highly desirable to provide in education, through the 
study of a variety of subjects, as rich a repertory as possible 
of " sets," so that in dealing with new material — or for that 
matter, even for the sake of dealing more effectively with 
the old — the mind may " apply itself more closely and dex- 
terously to the bents and turns of the matter in all its 
researches." 

(e) He insists on the importance for thinking of close 
attention, pointing out that habits of hasty and desultory work 
result from its neglect. 

This plainly does not square with Monroe's description of 
the disciplinary conception in education. According to Mon- 
roe, that conception teaches that (i) education in one well- 
selected subject, rather than in many, is best; (2) there is 
unlimited transfer of training; (3) education in the right 
subject defies the law of conservation of energy, getting thor- 
oughly disproportionate results : whereas we have seen that 
Locke, whom Monroe takes as the best representative of this 
conception; (1) teaches that education should be many-sided; 
(2) holds a doctrine of transfer differing little from the 
" identical elements " theory so generally held to-day : and 
if we take in his doctrine concerning the attitude, Locke's 
position is wholly reconcilable with that taken by Thorndike, 
perhaps the leading opponent of the disciplinary idea, in his 
most recent work. (3) Anything claiming disproportionate 
results for some particular subject is nowhere to be found in 
Locke's work. 

Turning to Locke's other educational work, " Some 
Thoughts Concerning Education," we find in his remarks 
on subjects of study, a corroboration of this interpretation 
of his doctrine; for his approval or disapproval of various 
subjects rests almost entirely on practical grounds. Espe- 
cially noticeable is his discussion of the two subjects around 
which controversy since his time has raged most violently — 
Latin grammar and mathematics. He disapproves the manner 
in which Latin grammar was used in his day, on the ground 
that the language could be better taught without teaching 
grammar at the beginning; and the Latin language itself is 
included in his course of study simply because " it is abso- 
lutely necessary for a gentleman " — holding then a place that 
French has since largely usurped, in England. Speaking of 
mathematics, he limits the amount of geometry that should 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 347 

be taught, to six books of Euclid, giving as his reason : " I 
am in some doubt, whether more to a man of business (i. e., 
man of affairs) be necessary or useful ; at least if he have 
a genius or inclination to it, being entered so far by his tutor, 
he will be able to go on of himself." (i, p. 149). There are 
a few remarks, in the discussion of subjects to be taught, 
that have a slight disciplinary coloring, but the impression 
one gains from reading that part of Locke's work, is that 
he is rather too indifferent not only to disciplinary but even 
to cultural values, in laying out his course of study. 

The fact is, Locke's real contribution is in his emphasis on 
the improvability of functions — precisely the thing for which 
Thorndike contends in his " Psychology of Learning " — and 
his theory is not at all at variance with the doctrine that trans- 
fer is a matter of " identical elements." On points of detail 
there are differences, but they are traceable wholly to dif- 
ferences in analysis, not to contradictions in theory. They 
only raise the questions : what elements are identical ? how 
are we to decide upon the identity of elements? — questions 
for which we have nowhere a decisive answer yet. It is 
further to be noted, Locke never taught that " the process 
of learning, and not the thing learned, is of importance." 
That introduces a false opposition — his emphasis was on the 
point that the thing learned — including the process of learn- 
ing — is important primarily because of its effect on the mind 
and character ; and mere unassimilated memorial learning is 
worthless. Monroe recognizes this when he says : " One of 
the most striking of Locke's positions, as well as one of the 
soundest of them, is the clear distinction he ever holds in 
mind between education and instruction." (1, p. 515.) This 
distinction has become a commonplace of educational thought 
to-day, thanks to the work of Locke, Rousseau, Herbart, and 
a host of lesser lights, but it was far from a commonplace 
in the 17th century — and even with us, it has penetrated 
but a very little way into the schools. 

When we turn to contemporary writers, we naturally find 
more stress laid on the so-called formal side of education, 
since this is the point against which the opposition has directed 
its attack. Wendell stresses the importance in education of 
developing concentration or will-power, saying that hard work 
of any sort can develop " increasingly and lastingly muscular 
power of voluntary attention." (12, p. 31.) Miinsterberg argues 
that in the effort to learn any activity, " the development is 
specific — the formal training of the will is general." But even 
the " specific character of the training must not be exagger- 
ated. ... By training for baseball, we secure general 



348 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

alertness in our motor responses." He further insists that 
(i) since every mental function can really be developed, 
" one side of mental life must not be crippled in the interest 
of others, as long as general education is in question " and 
(2) it is of the first importance that the voluntary attention 
be developed. Our education tends to neglect this, and so 
makes for superficiality. (12^.34-5.) All the other writers 
who take disciplinary standpoint also emphasize this, that 
will-power and voluntary attention can and should be devel- 
oped by education. Judd goes more into detail concerning 
disciplinary possibilities in the following passage : " We have 
been in the habit of saying that this or that kind of knowledge 
is valuable, and we have not really meant this or that kind 
of knowledge, but this or that subject-matter. I believe it 
is time for us to take an entirely different view of what is 
meant by the term kinds of knowledge. The ability to reason 
independently, the ability to retain the essentials and neglect 
the non-essentials, the ability to carry on certain types of 
inquiry in any subject-matter, all these forms of ability are 
more important than the ability to reproduce a body of par- 
ticular information. The meaning of this last contention may 
be made somewhat clearer by saying that what we need in 
our examination of the high-school course of study is a 
complete restatement of the values of these courses in terms 
of the mental habits which are cultivated as distinguished 
from the information which is gained. We are just at the 
beginning of a period of study of the effects of education." 
(12, pp. 39-40.) 

In these writers, again, we see that the stress is on un- 
provability of functions, as distinguished from, but not neces- 
sarily apart from, the subject-matter through which the im- 
provement is effected. As a matter of fact, — though none of 
the writers quoted has paid much attention to this point — 
the subject-matter is part of the process of learning, to be 
taken into account when we estimate the improvement of a 
function : we apply our knowledge, not mere formal mental 
powers, to new problems — but that knowledge, to be applic- 
able, must have been assimilated, organized, worked over into 
something that looks very much like a formal mental ability. 
" Mathematical ability," for example, is a knowledge of 
mathematical facts and principles which has become so much 
a part of oneself that he uses it as naturally as he would 
use sight and touch. Even " power of observation " involves 
the possession of facts available for comparison, and of prin- 
ciples — which are also facts — to guide the comparison ; as 
well as an understanding, to be gained only by experience, 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 349 

of the resources and limitations of the human organism, and 
of the best methods for attacking the problem to be faced. 
From one point of view, all this is simply knowledge : from 
another point of view it is pure mental power. 

The second point especially stressed by those who defend 
the disciplinary ideal, is that the power of voluntary atten- 
tion, acquired in the strenuous pursuit of any subject, is 
generally applicable to all affairs of life. But this is only 
holding that the voluntary attention which keeps a man at 
work on mathematics is identical with the voluntary attention 
that keeps him at work on a case at law, or a problem of 
business administration. Thus, whether or not the holders 
of the views just quoted accept the doctrine that all transfer 
is explained by the presence of identical elements in the 
activity from which and the activity to which the transfer 
occurs — and most of them, I believe, do accept it — at any 
rate, their contentions can perfectly well be stated in terms 
of that doctrine. Indeed, if we read any claim that a certain 
subject supplies a transferable training, we find it devoted 
almost entirely to pointing out elements that are in the opinion 
of its advocate common to that subject and certain other 
subjects, or certain of life's activities. The defender of Latin 
grammar and translation work points out the demand which 
his subject makes upon powers of observation, the mathe- 
matician stresses the training of reason ; both have much to 
say about the development of voluntary attention. But by 
the mode of their argument, they furnish common ground 
for discussion with their opponents. Prove that the observa- 
tion which the one talks about, the reasoning power that 
concerns the other, and the voluntary attention which seems 
so important to both, are not identical with the activities that 
bear the same name in other parts of life, and their contention 
falls to the ground. On the other hand, grant that there is 
a real identity under the identity of name, and their opponents 
must grant that training in those activities may transfer, at 
least. I say " may transfer," because while by this theory 
all transfer is of identical elements, yet this need not concede 
that training in identical elements always transfers. Experi- 
ence gives good reason to believe that it does not. The 
problem for us to investigate, then, is : " What are identical 
elements, and what principles control the transfer of training 
in them ? " 

I. Experimental Studies 

Owing chiefly, no doubt, to the fact that satisfactory meth- 
ods for comprehensive investigation of higher mental processes 
have not yet been devised, the experimental data on transfer 



350 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

are almost wholly confined to tests of what we may call 
peripheral functions, involving very little of the higher powers 
of observation and reasoning. Therefore experimental results 
prove nothing, unless by analogy, about the existence or pos- 
sibility of transfer in precisely those parts of our mental life 
where it would be most important. In general, there have 
been two kinds of studies: (i) studies of transferred improve- 
ment of memory; (2) studies in the transfer of sensory or 
sensory-motor skill. Each of these kinds calls for some gen- 
eral observations, after which I shall discuss in detail a few 
typical experiments. 

I. In the field of memory, any physiological explanation of 
that function would justify us in expecting to find absolutely 
no transfer of training. When memory was looked on as a 
sort of psychic reservoir, into which we dumped facts until 
we wanted them again, it was quite conceivable that use or 
training could enlarge the capacity of that reservoir ; but when 
we conceive of memory as merely the tendency of a neurone 
to retain an impression that has been stamped upon it, the 
only possible effect of repetition would be to stamp that par- 
ticular impression deeper, and it is not easy to see how the 
process would make the neurones constitutionally more recep- 
tive or more tenacious of other impressions, no matter how 
similar in content to the one through which the training was 
received. This objection holds, no matter which of the cur- 
rent views of memory we take. The only conceivable physio- 
logical correlate of a direct improvement of memory, is a 
change in the actual constitution of a neurone or group of 
neurones, quite apart from the increased sensitiveness of the 
neurone or neurones to the stimuli representing the subject- 
matter which furnished the original training. Any direct im- 
provement of memory as a function, is a case of real transfer, 
even though it be from the learning of one list of nonsense- 
syllables to the learning of another. Not only is memory not 
a faculty ; it is not even a group of faculties : there are as 
many memories as there are things learned ; every new thing 
learned is a new memory. Memory is simply a property of 
nerve substance, and to change this property would change 
the substance — unless we want to postulate a psychic ele- 
ment of memory which may change without a corresponding 
physiological change. But perhaps memory does improve, 
and the constitution of the neurones does change as an effect 
of training: I am not concerned either to affirm or to deny 
such a change, but only to point out that if there is actual 
improvement of memory through training, it can only be ex- 
plained as accomplished in that way, and if that occurs we 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 351 

have a case of not transfer, but " spread " of training, irre- 
ducible to the functioning of identical elements. For practi- 
cal pedagogy, I believe this is a matter of small importance; 
we have every reason to think that the amount possible of 
direct improvement of memory, if any at all, is very slight. 
Far the greater part of all gain in memorial efficiency is more 
satisfactorily explained as resulting from improvements in the 
technique of memorizing: finding advantageous devices of 
grouping and rhythm, improved methods of applying the 
attention, ways of invoking the aid of association, and in a 
general way, getting a better understanding — mostly subcon- 
scious, to be sure — of the properties of the nervous substance 
with which memorizing is so predominantly concerned. 

The physiological conception of memory has crowded out 
the conception of memory as a unit faculty, or as a group 
of faculties, and so makes it impossible that we should speak 
of any general training of memory, or of any considerable 
amount of specific training. But at the same time, it gives 
us a new and sounder basis for » doctrine of general training 
in memorial technique. If memory is not a faculty function- 
ing as a unit, yet it has a homogeneous physical basis, for 
we have no reason to suppose that the nervous substance 
of different parts of the brain obeys different laws. Conse- 
quently, so far as improving the technique of memorizing con- 
sists in discovering better ways of applying the principles 
which describe the behavior of nervous substances, just so 
far is the technique an identical element in all memorial work, 
and just so far can it function as such. None, I believe, of 
these general principles is separated out in memorial work 
from more special adaptations determined by the subject- 
matter in which the work is done, but a glance at some of 
the facts concerning the behavior of memory will serve to 
show the presence of these underlying laws: (a) The influ- 
ence of the task and the attitude (Aafgabe and Einstelhmg) . 
In actual practice, the task and the attitude are different things 
when one is learning nonsense-syllables from what they are 
when he is learning poetry ; but in both cases, the task of 
learning so as to reproduce gets a different result from the 
task of learning so as to recognize the right order of the 
words. The " set " to remember for five minutes gets a dif- 
ferent result from that brought by the " set " to remember for 
a week, (b) Finding optimal groupings and rhythms, and 
optimal length of working periods, of intervals between sit- 
tings, etc. These vary immensely, from the comparatively 
short periods required by nonsense-syllables, to the long 
periods that are favorable with a subject-matter of a kind that 



352 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

is interesting, familiar, and significant to the learner ; but at 
the bottom in all cases lies the fact that it takes a little time 
to raise the function to its highest efficiency, and then a cer- 
tain amount of work is sufficient to bring on the fatigue that 
reduces efficiency to a fraction of what it is when the function 
is fresh. There is good reason to suppose that this length 
of endurance is a constant for any individual, given uniform 
conditions of health and general bodily efficiency ; and that 
we can work longer at significant material not because the 
neurones can stand more work of that sort, but because the 
significance of the material gives any one neurone or group 
of neurones less to do, spreads the same amount of actual 
memorial work over a longer period, and allows breathing- 
spells between, (c) The use of association as an aid to 
memory. This of course dwindles to a minimum in the case 
of nonsense-syllables and of any unfamiliar material. To in- 
voke the aid of association, there must be some knowledge 
in the mind with which associations may be formed : thus the 
later stages of learning a foreign language become much more 
efficient than the beginnings, because the basis for associations 
has been built up. But our interest at present is only in the 
physiological principle on which the helpfulness of associa- 
tions for memory work rests. To establish an association 
with a given impression is equivalent to lowering its threshold. 
Without the presence of the association, the only stimulus 
available to reproduce the thing learned is a direct act of 
will : only an impression of a certain strength can respond to 
that stimulus — in other words, the threshold of response to 
a simple act of will is comparatively high. But given the aid 
of an established association, we have a more adequate stimu- 
lus, capable of rousing to response a weaker impression — the 
threshold of response has been lowered. And the greater the 
number of associations, the lower the threshold for the given 
impression becomes, and the less deeply does it need to be 
stamped in. 

This is sufficient to illustrate my point: it is my purpose 
here only to point out that when we conceive of memory 
as a function or property of nerve-substance, we destroy 
the old idea of a general training of memory, but we must 
also infer in the place of the old idea, a new conclusion, 
that there are certain laws of learning, based on the behav- 
ior of nerve-substance, which are as general as the nerve- 
substance itself, and therefore function as identical elements 
in all memory-work, and furnish a medium for transfer of 
training. It might be added, anticipating what I shall de- 
velop more fully later, that the actual amount of transfer 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 353 

becomes much greater if the functioning of these laws is 
brought to consciousness, either by good teaching or by the 
intelligence of the learner himself; but I believe there is 
always and inevitably some transfer, until the limit of im- 
provability is reached, though the transfer may be obscured 
or even negatived by mal-adjustment to the new subject- . 
matter in which evidence of transfer may be sought. 

Many of the facts about transfer of training in memory 
are clearly brought out in Fracker's study of the problem, 
which is one of the best that we have. Preliminary tests were 
given in memory for (i) poetry, (2) the order of four 
shades of gray, (3) the order of nine tones of different inten- 
sities, (4) the order of nine shades of gray, (5) the order of 
four tones — the major chord, (6) the order of nine geometri- 
cal figures, (7) the order of nine two-place numbers, (8) the 
extent of arm movement. Tests number 2, 3, 4, and 5 were 
given by a method which the author describes in the case 
of the four grays as follows : " The stimulator was arranged 
to expose each of the four gray disks for one-half second, an 
interval of one-half second being allowed between each ex- 
posure. . . . After the four grays were exposed, a blank 
remained before the observer for four seconds, then another 
arrangement of the four grays was given and another blank 
exposed. When the second blank appeared, the observer re- 
sponded, giving aloud the order of the first group of four 
grays. After the third group had been exposed, he responded 
to the order of the second group, and so on through the 
series. In responding to the order of the four grays, the ob- 
server called the darkest gray, 4 ; the next lighter, 3 ; the next 
lighter, 2; and the lightest, 1." In the tests of nine tones, 
only four intensities were used, and arranged into groups of 
nine : for the nine grays, the four shades employed in experi- 
ment (2) were used. After the records of the test series had 
been taken, a training series was taken, using the four tones 
of experiment (3), and the method just described. Thus the 
training series was wholly identical in method with the series 
in the four grays, differing only in the use of tone-intensities 
instead of shades of a color. 

It was found in the course of the training that all but two 
of the observers recognized a peculiar imagery, out of which 
a sort of mnemonic method was built. It is interesting to 
notice that none of them tried to improve their direct memory 
of the four tones, but all immediately translated the order of 
the group of tones into terms of position in space, of the 
serial names "4213," etc., or some other form of representa- 
tive imagery. This is certainly a case of calling an easier 



354 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

type of imagery to the aid of a more difficult : it would be 
interesting to inquire if it was also partly due to a half- 
unconscious effort to enlist the aid of association. But the 
important thing for our problem is that we have here in the 
training series itself the development of what might be called 
a manufactured transfer. With every one of the observers 
who recognized a distinct method of remembering, the real 
training was not at all in memory for the order of four in- 
tensities of tone, but in memory for something quite different; 
and the four tones were only treated as symbols designating 
the order in which these artificial images were to be arranged. 
One observer had a system closely related to the content of 
the tests, for he imaged the loudest tone as close to his ear, 
the softest as placed some distance off, and the other two in 
intermediate positions; but another had a purely visual sys- 
tem, made up of different-sized dots arranged in a vertical 
line. 'There is certainly no identity between black dots and 
tones, nor can it be supposed that these dissimilar images 
function in identical neurones, since no one holds that the vis- 
ual centers and the auditory centers in the brain coincide: the 
only real identity is found in the two abstractions of " differ- 
ence in size " and " arrangement in serial order," which were 
common to the dots and the tones — that is instead of transfer- 
ence through identical elements, we have transference through 
community of an abstraction, which is transference by anal- 
ogy. Such a method is naturally applicable wherever the 
analogy holds good, provided that no condition is arbitrarily 
introduced that interferes with the smooth working of the 
method, as in the case of the four tones different in pitch, 
where the tones were called " Do, Me, Sol, D0-2," in the 
responses, instead of being named, " 1, 2, 3, 4." 

How far this transference by analogy can be applied de- 
pends on the intelligence of the individual ; on his ability to 
discover analogies. How far it will be applied depends again 
on his intelligence, his resourcefulness in devising new 
methods, his ability to recognize the limits of economy in 
transference. One observer may struggle along trying to apply 
his method by forced analogy, in situations to which it is not 
at all suited, while his more intelligent neighbor, recognizing 
that his method is wasteful in the new situation, will abandon 
it for a better method, even at some temporary loss in ef- 
ficiency. Fracker's results illustrate both these points : that 
there is gain in transference by analogy, and that there is loss 
if the transference is carried too far. The former point, as 
I have shown, appears even in the results of the training 
series: it appears again in the final test series. Those who 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 355 

had developed a definite method in the training series, both 
improved most in the training, and showed the greatest gain 
in the final tests. Of the final tests, the four grays, nine tones, 
nine grays, and four tones could be handled by the methods 
developed in the training series, but the use of names instead 
of numbers to designate the four tones interfered very seri- 
ously with the application of this method to it, as several of 
the observers testified. The other three of the final tests to 
which the methods used in the training series could be ap- 
plied, show in some cases a greater gain than was made in 
the training series — the training apparently transferred with 
more than hundred-per-cent efficiency. That there should 
be no loss of efficiency in the transfer need cause no surprise, 
for none of the observers was really training himself to re- 
member the order of four tones differing in intensity. They 
all took the tones as symbols, possessing an obvious serial 
order, and trained themselves in remembering some sort of 
images in the order designated by these symbols. Any other 
set of equally understandable symbols would do just as well, 
as these experiments show. 

The result with the test series of four tones is an interest- 
ing illustration of the tyranny of method. It was natural that 
stimuli so notoriously difficult to image distinctly as differences 
in intensity of sound, should be translated into other terms, 
but where the subject-matter is made up of differences in pitch, 
and such easy differences as the intervals of the major chord, 
it is unlikely that all of the observers were incapable of learn- 
ing to work from direct imagery of the sounds, for anyone 
who can carry a simple tune in his head has sufficiently good 
auditory imagery to succeed with it. One did try it, but found 
that the notes tended to fuse into a chord — an unusual experi- 
ence, surely, in the field of auditory imagery. The others all 
applied their previously formed methods — unsuccessfully, as 
I have already noticed, because names were used instead of 
numbers — and found this, which, for one of even moderate 
auditory imagery, was intrinsically the easiest of the four 
tests that resembled the training series, to be very much the 
hardest. The method transferred, where transference was a 
disadvantage. 

In the tests essentially unlike the training series, the trained 
observers again showed superiority over the untrained con- 
trol-group, which suggests that a transferable mnemonic sys- 
tem is not the only factor in improvement. The factors that 
influenced the essentially dissimilar tests, as Fracker points 
out, were: (i) the discovery that imagery is helpful. The 
special imagery developed in training may not itself be trans- 



356 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

ferable, but experience with it suggests the idea of deliberately 
employing some kind of imagery. In the training series, 
imagery had been unconsciously developed, and only recog- 
nized later. (2) " The factor of attention and its control 
seems to be an important one in improvement and transfer- 
ence," being ranked second to imagery, by the observers. 
(3) Association: but this factor does not come out very 
clearly in the experiments. (4) Automatisms. These may 
either help or hinder in transference. They make a method 
less adaptable, but where the method can be applied in toto, 
or at least without change in the automatised factors, they 
are a distinct advantage. The great improvement in the four 
grays in the final tests, and the small improvement in the four 
tones, illustrate both points. In the former test, every au- 
tomatism could be transferred ; in the latter, the use of num- 
bers in the response had to be broken up. 

II. Sensory and Sensory-motor Skill. By this rather in- 
adequate title I wish to designate the great group of functions 
— using the word in Thorndike's sense — that have much to do 
in a rather superficial way with things, and very little to do 
with ideas, or interpretations of things. Such are Thorndike 
and Woodworth's experiments on estimating areas and 
weights, in perceiving words containing certain letters, etc. ; 
Squire's experiments on neatness ; and tests made by various 
psychologists on localization of lines, on discrimination of 
pitches in tones and shades in colors. Even Ruger's experi- 
ments with mechanical puzzles belong mainly in this group, 
for, while they involve mathematical principles, and might be 
solved by direct application of those principles, yet it is doubt- 
ful if anyone has ever applied that method, and Ruger's ob- 
servers certainly did not. They simply manipulated the puz- 
zles more or less blindly until they fell on the solutions by 
accident. Experience became somewhat of a guide, but only 
in a rule-of-thumb sort of way. I shall consider the data in 
this field under three heads: (1) motor skill, (2) sensory skill 
(discrimination, accurate perception, etc.), (3) general — 
those activities which involve rather ingenuity than either fine 
motor co-ordination of especially accurate sense-perception. 

1 : Transference in motor skill. Of the numerous experi- 
ments in this field, most seem to have been concerned with 
transference of improvement in reaction times, where motor 
co-ordination is of the simplest sort. Most of the others have 
been of what I might call an " unreal " kind — such as learning 
to repeat the alphabet forward and backward, then inserting 
n after each letter (AnBnCn, ZnYnXn) to test for transfer 
of improvement from those as training series to the test series 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 357 

AxBxCx, etc. They lead on the whole to the conclusion that 
the transfer of training in such work is very limited. A test 
much more comparable to problems of real life was made by 
Scholkow and Judd, who tested boys of grades 5 to 6 in 
school, at hitting a target under water. I quote their report: 
" One group of boys was given a full theoretical explanation 
of refraction. The other group of boys was left to work out 
experience without theoretical training. These two groups 
began practice with the target under twelve inches of water. 
It is a very striking fact that in the first series of trials the 
boys who knew the theory of refraction and those who did 
not, gave about the same results. That is, theory seemed to 
be of no value in the first tests. All the boys had to learn 
how to use the dart, and theory proved to be no substitute 
for practice. At this point the conditions were changed. The 
twelve inches of water were reduced to four. The differences 
between the two groups of boys now came out very strikingly. 
The boys without theory were very much confused. The 
practice gained with twelve inches of water did not help them 
with four inches. Their errors were large and persistent. On 
the other hand, the boys who had the theory, fitted themselves 
to four inches very rapidly." (15, p. 37.) There is one impor- 
tant difference in method, which no one has observed, between 
this and all the other transfer-tests yet published. Instead of 
taking the record of a single test with the water at four inches 
as the measure of relative improvement for the boys with and 
the boys without theory, the experimenters gave a fairly long 
training in the changed conditions, and measured the relative 
rates of improvement. The record for the first few trials 
at a depth of four inches is not given, but it would have shown 
a much smaller gain, at the best, for the boys with the theory, 
than the record showed as it was actually taken. If we 
compare the usual method of testing for transfer, with the 
" method of free reproduction " in association tests, then 
Judd's method in this experiment is analogous to the " saving 
method." Besides this point of method, there are two points 
especially important in the results : ( 1 ) without a certain 
minimum of experience, theory can afford no help; (2) given 
that minimum of experience, theory is transferable to all 
analogous situations, to great advantage. 

Experience in every-day life bears out this conclusion. 
That athletic experience can and does transfer with a high 
degree of efficiency is a matter of common knowledge : experi- 
ence in football often facilitates the learning of basket-ball ; 
experience in baseball helps in tennis. This observation is 
not to be ruled out of court on the ground that the person 



358 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

whose experience seemed to transfer was only better in natural 
ability, for the one who began tennis, for example, without 
previous experience in other sports, sometimes proves his 
superior native ability by ultimately outstripping his opponent 
whose athletic training had given an initial advantage. The 
transference can be explained by the theory of identical ele- 
ments. But I can speak with fuller knowledge in the field of 
music. Mastery of one instrument does make it easier to 
learn another, quite apart from the advantage gained by 
learning to read music and keep time. Mastery of two or 
three instruments gives a tremendous advantage in the early 
stages of learning a new one, though after this initial ad- 
vantage, in which a saving of as much as two years' work 
may be made, then progress is no more rapid than for one 
of the same attainments who knows no other instrument. I 
shall cite one case which I had a chance to observe very 
carefully. An amateur violinist of good average ability, and 
given to theorizing on the principles underlying the rules of 
technique, took a few months' lessons on the piano. In 
laboratory tests his reaction times were found somewhat slow, 
and his accuracy in remembering movements of forearm and 
upper arm was not above the average. But his rate of learn- 
ing on the piano was at first very rapid, scales were readily 
learned, independence of finger action, especially required in 
using both hands at once, was easy, and he acquired within 
two months considerable readiness at playing loud and soft 
simultaneously with different fingers of the same hand, and 
at playing simultaneously legato and staccato — in simple 
pieces, of course. The correct action for the staccato touch 
was learned in three lessons. Curiously enough, while the 
advantage of training had been with the left hand, that hand 
proved awkward and troublesome on the piano, while the 
right hand fell quickly into correct habits, and apparently was 
superior even in strength. This suggests that the direct mus- 
cular training acquired on the violin was the least factor in 
the transference, and that the gain was almost wholly due to 
a better understanding of the conditions of muscular training: 
particularly a greater power of sound self-criticism. The 
student had learned to recognize when an action " felt " right, 
and where to look for faults when it did not. It is further 
significant, that he showed least advantage from previous 
training, in the one place where understanding can least take 
the place of plodding work in muscular habituation : in learn- 
ing to estimate accurately the distances on the keyboard for 
various musical intervals he had little advantage over an un- 
trained student, and had gained but little fluency by the end 
of his period of study. 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 359 

2 : Transference in sensory skill. It may seem an abuse 
of words to speak of sensory " skill," since we think of skill 
as essentially motor : but ability to discriminate shades in 
color, differences of pitch, intensity, and quality in tone, length 
and form in lines in figures, etc., certainly is at least analogous 
to what we call skill in the use of the limbs and muscles. The 
experimental data in this field are not very satisfactory. Two 
of the most often quoted studies are that reported by Thorn- 
dike and Woodworth in 1901, and that reported by Coover and 
Angell in 1907. Since they come from what are generally 
regarded as opposing camps, we may reach something like 
reliable conclusions by checking them off against each other. 
Thorndike's experiments tested the gain in accuracy of judg- 
ing the areas of various-shaped figures from 10 to 100 sq. 
cm. in size, of rectangles from 140-300 sq. cm. in size, 
and of various-shaped figures from 140-400 sq. cm. in size : 
after practising the observers on a training series in estimat- 
ing the areas of rectangles from 10 to 100 sq. cm. in size. 
They also reported other experiments with lines and weights, 
resting on the same principle. The tests in ability to perceive 
words containing certain letters have to do with quite a dif- 
ferent thing than sensory skill, and hence will not be discussed 
here. The results show an undoubted transfer of training, 
which the investigators explain as due to ( 1 ) acquisition of 
certain improvements in mental standards of areas ; (2) learn- 
ing to make allowance for constant error. " That there was 
no influence due to a mysterious transfer of practice, to an 
unanalyzable property of mental function, is evidenced by the 
total lack of improvement in the functions tested in the case 
of some individuals " (27, p. 276). Here we see, what we have 
already noticed in other fields, that the chief gain is rather 
in an improved power of the understanding to find short-cuts 
in dealing with material, than in an increased efficiency of the 
sense or senses themselves. Our instruments do not improve : 
we only learn to use them better. Those who do not learn 
to use their instruments — the muscles and senses — from prac- 
tice, show little or no transfer of improvement from the 
practice. Thorndike and Woodworth explicitly recognize this. 
They remark: "With some subjects in some cases the new 
ideas or the refinement of old ideas produced by the training 
seem impotent to influence judgments with slightly different 
data." (27, p. 395.) 

Coover and Angell tested the improvement in discriminat- 
ing shades of gray, after a course of training in discrimina- 
tion of intensities of sound. The fact that the control-group 
actually got worse between the preliminary and the final re- 
sults, makes one rather uneasy about the reliability of the 



360 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

results : we should like a little firmer assurance that such is 
the normal effect in this kind of work, before accepting these 
results as final. But even allowing for this weak spot in the 
tests, it is generally admitted that they prove the existence 
of some transfer: the only dispute is as to how much they 
show. In explaining the results, the authors say : Improve- 
ment seems to consist of divesting the essential process of 
the unessential factors, freeing judgments from illusions, to 
which the unnecessary and often fantastic imagery gives rise, 
and of obtaining a uniform state of attention which is less 
than the maximum. . . . The factors in this transfer are 
due in great part to habituation and to a more economic 
adaptation of attention, i. e., are general rather than special 
in character." (4, pp. 333-4.) Instead of speaking of the fac- 
tors as " general rather than special in character," it is less 
ambiguous to say that they are central rather than peripheral ; 
that the improvement is due to a better understanding of and 
use of the psychophysical organism — or that part of it in- 
volved in the process studied — rather than to a change in the 
constitution of the organism. Thorndike and Angell are at 
one on this point, though I believe they do not recognize the 
fact. Both deny the spread of training — to any great extent, 
at least — through a change in the physical factors (the muscles 
and senses), and both stress the importance of the mental 
factors. Their differences are in the view they take of some 
of the higher mental functions. For Angell, attention is one 
function; for Thorndike, it is many: in the one case, it can 
be thought of as functioning more generally than in the other. 
Concerning the question involved in this dispute, I shall have 
more to say later: for the present, the important thing to 
notice is their agreement that the chief factors in the transfer 
of improvement found in their experiments, are mental. The 
senses involved have not become appreciably finer, subtler, in 
their responses to stimuli, but the mind has learned better 
how to put them to work, and how to read their reports. 

3 : General. Transference in problem-solving. Under this 
heading I shall take Squire's and Ruediger's experiments on 
neatness, and Ruger's experiments with mechanical puzzles, 
as typical. Squire found in tests of children in the interme- 
diate grades that efforts to teach the children neatness in 
the arithmetic papers brought about a marked improvement 
in those papers, but an actual decrease in both neatness and 
accuracy in language and spelling papers. The explanation 
is obvious when we reflect that improvement involves two 
factoro, the will to be neat, and the ability to accomplish neat- 
ness. Neatness is not a characteristic virtue of the elementary 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 361 

grades, and when the teachers would pester the children about 
their arithmetic papers, the children naturally made up for 
it by slighting their other work, so long as nothing was said 
about that. The experiment should have been carried further. 
By dropping the emphasis on neatness in arithmetic, and turn- 
ing the attention to the spelling papers, the investigators would 
almost certainly have found a marked falling off in neatness 
of the arithmetic papers — though not a complete return to 
the old standard — and would have found improvement more 
rapid in the new subject than in the former one. Given the 
will to be neat, the skill acquired in the work on arithmetic 
papers can perfectly well be transferred to work on other 
papers : but the amount of automatic, involuntary transfer 
from one activity to another is certain to be small. Ruediger 
partially recognized this fact, and made a series of tests on 
neatness, in which, besides working actively for neatness in 
one subject, the teachers continually brought the ideal of neat- 
ness before the children, though making no special allusion to 
the other school subjects. The result was an unquestionable 
improvement on the average in all subjects, though the im- 
provement was greatest in the subject where it was em- 
phasized. But while these tests found a half-unconscious 
transfer of the will to be neat, they do not attempt to discover 
how far skill in neatness can be transferred by conscious, 
deliberate effort. 

Ruger's report on his tests with mechanical puzzles is full 
of instructive material on the learning process, but only his 
data and comments on transfer will be noted here. He reports 
three tests on the transfer of specific motor habits : 

(i) "A subject was tested with a puzzle thrown in chance 
positions, then trained to approximately the physiological limit 
in handling four special but important positions. He devel- 
oped no general rule to include his treatment of these special 
positions. Another subject was trained entirely with chance 
positions, in a series approximately half the length of the first 
subject's series. The second tests of the first subject showed 
no improvement over the initial results, and were inferior 
to those of the second subject. This failure to profit by the 
highly specialized training seems to have been due to the 
lack of a generalized rule of procedure. As it was, each 
chance position was first reduced to one of the four special 
positions and then the solution was proceeded with instead of 
being performed directly." (23, p. 18.) 

(2) " A certain puzzle was so arranged that it could be 
presented in various forms. The manipulations for these 
various forms could all be comprised under a single formula. 



362 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

This general formula could be deduced from any one of 
these special forms. A number of subjects were tried with 
this puzzle. As soon as skill was acquired in dealing with 
one form of the puzzle it was changed to another form. The 
subjects who developed the general formula during the solu- 
tion of the first form were able to use the specialized habits 
built up in the first form in the second. Those who formed 
merely the special habits without developing the principle at- 
tempted to carry over the habits without modification and 
were greatly embarrassed by the change. 

(3) " A subject was tested with a puzzle in a given form. 
Then all the motor habits necessary for the rapid solution of 
this form were built up by practice in the separate acts of 
manipulation involved. The elements were organically related 
in the successive forms of the practice series, so that the prac- 
tice was not on the separate elements merely but on their 
connections. At the close of the practice series the subject 
was given the complete form, which was identical with that 
of the initial test. This form was not recognized as being 
related to the practice series, and the habits built up there 
were not brought into use. 

" In general, the value of specific habits under a change of 
conditions depended directly on the presence of a general idea 
which would serve for their control." 

This is fully in harmony, we see, with the principle already 
stated, that most, if not all, transfer is central, not peripheral. 
An idea or an ideal can be readily adapted, adjusted to the 
new conditions : a motor, sensory, or sensory-motor habit, if 
highly developed, must be taken over unchanged, or changed 
at the cost of much effort ; while if it is not highly developed, 
little is gained by its transference. A new habit could almost 
as easily be built up. 

The report just quoted raises the question: why do motor 
habits sometimes transfer when they should not, and not 
transfer when they should? The answer is fairly obvious in 
this particular case: the transfer resulted from a mistaken 
assumption of similarity in the two cases (see above, Ruger 
experiment 2) ; the failure to transfer (Ruger, 3) from non- 
observance of similarity. When we turn to every-day experi- 
ences, however, the problem seems more intricate, for we find 
cases of transfer occurring even against the will of the agent, 
and non-transference where the agent is actively trying to 
bring the habits into play which refuse to transfer. The 
solution of the problem is, I think, substantially the same 
as before, except that in place of conscious perception of simi- 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 363 

larity, we have a more or less unconscious reaction to simi- 
larity, which calls up the seemingly most appropriate " set," 
and with it, the habits which long-continued practice has as- 
sociated with it : the undesired habits thus called in crowd 
out the other habits whose transfer is desired. Apparently 
we can only approach just so close to the groove of an estab- 
lished habit without slipping in, willy-nilly. 

We conclude, then, that " improvement of functions " by 
training is wholly, or almost wholly, central, not peripheral 
— not a new doctrine, certainly, but one whose consequences 
have been often overlooked even by those who hold it. Me- 
morial work does not train the memory either as a whole or 
in part : it merely stamps in certain impressions. Motor work 
does not train a " motor function " ; it only forms certain 
motor habits, or tendencies to repeat the specific acts that 
were performed in that work. These habits do not transfer 
even to the most similar situations unless the similarity is 
taken for identity ; and in that case they transfer unchanged : 
nor do they have any immediate effect in making other habits 
easier to form. But in doing motor work, or memory work, 
we can also observe how it was done, and use the " know 
how " thus acquired to make our next bit of work more ef- 
ficient. Experience can teach us how the memory behaves, 
just as it teaches a mechanic the behavior of his material — 
wood, iron, tin, or stone — and this understanding of the be- 
havior of memory, muscle, the senses, and thought, constitutes 
the real and only direct training possible in any of these fields 
of work. In its applicability, this training is universal, for 
memory behaves in substantially the same way whether deal- 
ing with nonsense-syllables or philosophical prose : the laws 
of muscle-action are essentially the same whether the work 
be driving nails or setting a bone. Very few of us are pene- 
trating enough in our analysis of these laws, or judicious 
enough in their application, to secure this universal transfer: 
we only accomplish a very limited transfer, because the 
strangeness of the subject-matter, when we get too remote 
from the material with which we had our original experience, 
baffles our attempt to discover the community of underlying 
principles between the two. It is easier to work up our ex- 
perience clear from the beginning, again. But the possibility 
of universal transfer is always with us : how extensive a 
transfer any one can achieve from a given bit of experience 
depends on the amount of intelligence which he devotes to the 
task. 



364 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

In accomplishing this transfer of training, if one can use 
habits already formed, as components in the forming of new 
habits, he saves just so much in the process : thus we have 
an indirect transfer-value of existing habits. Where one has 
a countless number of habits already formed, as in the use 
of the hand and arm, or a countless number of memorial im- 
pressions established, as we all have in our mass of knowledge, 
this transfer-value is of tremendous importance for the for- 
mation of a new habit, or the establishment of a new memorial 
impression : where the transfer is only from one small habit 
or memory to another, the transfer-value is relatively insignifi- 
cant. But in any case, the use of intelligence is necessary to 
realize the transfer-value: habits can rarely be taken over 
bodily and unchanged. They must be adapted, and in adapt- 
ing them, one must be able to distinguish essential from ap- 
parent similarity and difference in the two situations. A 
wrong diagnosis results in misadaptation to the new case : 
habits and parts of habits transfer that should not, and those 
that should transfer fail to do so. 

All but one of the tests for transfer that have come to my 
notice, have made one serious error in method : that one is 
the experiment by Judd and Scholkow, mentioned above 
(p. 357). In actual life, the thing of value is not the gain in 
efficiency found at the very beginning of a new activity, due to 
training in something else ; but the gain in improvability. Not 
how much unconscious, automatic transfer has already been 
effected, is the question of importance, but how much trans- 
fer can one effect by the use of intelligence and deliberate 
effort, given time to adjust himself to the new situation, to 
seize its points of essential similarity to the old situation, 
and of essential difference. Therefore, instead of taking the 
record for immediate improvement in the final test series, as 
the measure of transfer, experimenters should after the train- 
ing series, make of the final tests a new training series, and 
compare the rate of improvement for the trained group and 
the control group in the final test-training. In experiments 
involving such things as simple reaction-times, we should ex- 
pect very little difference, for they give little scope for the 
use of intelligence : in tests of greater complexity, such as, 
say, transfer from typewriting to telegraphy, we should ex- 
pect a marked difference. The more intelligent should at first 
greatly outstrip the control group, then settle down to a normal 
rate of improvement, keeping their advantage, but making 
no further gain over the control group. The less intelligent 
should in some cases lag behind the control group, from trans- 
ferring the wrong habits, which would interfere with progress. 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 365 

Learning and Transfer in General. 

The results found in these experiments are of only sym- 
bolic value for education : they do not test the activities that 
mean most for life, but only very small analogues and ele- 
ments of the activities and abilities that are supposed to dis- 
tinguish a leader from a follower, a cultivated man from an 
uncultivated, a master from a tyro. The bigger question now 
confronts us : what is education : can one acquire improved 
power for meeting novel situations, as well as greater famili- 
arity with old ones ; can college training fit for business, and 
if so, how; have different subjects their peculiar cultural 
value, and if so, in what does it consist? The remainder of 
my study will be devoted to the principles on which rest the 
answer to these questions. 

Nearly, if not quite, every fact and principle that has 
any bearing on the question of formal discipline has already 
been noticed by writers on the psychology of learning. The 
" one thing needful " is that these facts and principles should 
be brought together, their relations to each other made clear 
where they have been overlooked, and the whole reduced to 
coherence. In attempting this task, I shall follow very largely 
Thorndike's Psychology of Learning, probably the soundest 
and certainly the completest work that we have on the subject. 
For clearness and convenience of reference, I shall preface 
my discussion with a brief abstract of his account of the 
mechanism of learning. He distinguishes the following laws 
of learning: 

I. Three main laws of learning. 

(a) The law of readiness: When any conduction unit is 
in readiness to conduct, for it to do so is satisfying; not 
to do so is annoying. When it is not in -readiness to con- 
duct, for it to do so is annoying. 

(b) The law of exercise: 

( i ) The law of use : " When a modifiable connection is 
made between a situation and a response, that connec- 
tion's strength is, other things being equal, increased." 
(26, p. 3.) 

(2) The law of disuse: When a modifiable connection 
is not made between a situation and a response during 
a length of time, that connection's strength is decreased." 
(26, p. 4.) 

(c) The law of effect: "When a modifiable connection is 
between a situation and a response is made and is ac- 
companied or followed by a satisfying state of affairs, 



366 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

that connection's strength is increased : when made and 
accompanied or followed by an annoying state of affairs, 
its strength is decreased." (26, p. 4.) 

II. Five secondary characteristics of learning. 

(a) Multiple response to the same external situation. This 
is the universal method of meeting a new situation : we 
try various new responses until we find one that satisfies. 
In animal learning, the responses are almost purely blind, 
random movements ; in man they may be guided, stimu- 
lated, or checked in various ways, but the principle re- 
mains the same. It is only though this principle that we 
can break away from our plexus of habits, meet new 
situations, and form new habits. 

(b) Attitudes or " sets." These determine the general char- 
acter of the multiple responses aroused by the new situ- 
ation, and what response will be selected out of those 
appearing. The relation between the set in a given situ- 
ation, and the laws of readiness and effect, is very 
intimate. One's set determines what conduction units 
shall be in readiness to conduct ; and this determines what 
responses will satisfy or annoy. 

(c) The partial or piecemeal activity of a situation. One 
or other part of a situation may be prepotent in effect : 
in more popular language, we tend to analyze situations, 
and respond to those parts only that seem important, or 
convenient to take first. 

(d) Assimilation of response by analogy. " To any new 
situation man responds as he would to some situation 
like it, or like some element of it." (26, p. 28.) "Were 
the situation so utterly new as to be in no respect like 
anything responded to before, and also so foreign to 
man's equipment as neither to arouse an original tendency 
to respond nor to be like anything that could do so, 
response by analogy would fail. For all response would 
fail. Man's nature would be forever blind and deaf to 
the situation in question." (26, p. 29.) To what experi- 
ence any situation shall appear similar, depends on the 
man and his previous education. Coal dust has a simi- 
larity to diamonds in the mind of a chemist : to an unedu- 
cated man it would be similar to something of a quite 
different sort. 

(e) Associative shifting. This depends on the same prin- 
ciple as response by analogy. We readily learn to make 
the same response to part of a situation that we have 
done to the whole : and we may come to lose sight of 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 367 

the whole in our response to the part. The very exist- 
ence of language is a result of this principle ; the danger 
against which we have always to guard of mistaking the 
word for the thing, is the result of a tendency to make 
the associative shifting too complete. 

This analysis of the mechanism of learning may be left 
without comment, since the points on which it might be 
challenged are not relevant to the present study: but certain 
other points in Thorndike's treatment of the psychology of 
learning, which have a bearing on the question of formal 
discipline, need to be criticized and supplemented. These 
are his discussions of (i) habit, (2) thinking, (3) functions, 
(4) attention. On all four of these subjects Thorndike is 
vague — purposely, as I take it, from unwillingness to intro- 
duce any speculative question or anything of doubtful validity 
into his book — and consequently I write here in constant 
danger of misinterpreting and misrepresenting him. But 
psychological thought has progressed far enough to make 
possible something like a definite determination of what these 
four terms should mean. 

( 1 ) Habit. " To one accustomed to the older restricted 
view of habits, as a set of hard and fast bonds each between 
one of a number of events happening to a man and some 
response peculiar to that event, it may seem especially per- 
verse to treat the connections formed with new experiences 
under the same principle as is used to explain those very 
often repeated, very sure, and very invariable bonds, which 
alone he prefers to call habits." (26, p. 28.) Not exactly 
perverse, we might reply, but rather confusing. The diffi- 
culty seems to lie in this : Thorndike calls the laws of 
learning which have just been given, " laws of habit," and 
then apparently assumes that every process which obeys 
those laws is a habit. But they are laws of habit only 
in the sense that they are the mechanism by which habits 
are formed : every process which obeys those laws has in it 
the makings of a habit, but has not yet become one. Once let 
the process became a habit, and several of these laws fall into 
abeyance. Multiple response, for example, is supplemented 
by the uniform,, unvarying, and even undiscriminating re- 
sponse of the fixed habit; associative shifting can only be 
accomplished at the expense of the habit ; and the principle 
of assimilation is only a source of embarrassment, unless one 
is able to adapt — that is, partially break up, and re-form — 
the habit thus transferred. What, then, is a habit? A habit 
is a tendency to repeat an action which has often been per- 
formed before. So far as the action has become habitual, 



368 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

it will be repeated unchanged. Habits and memory are essen- 
tially one, arising from the universal tendency of the neurones 
to retain impressions. Habit and memory are static: a habit 
cannot form itself, nor can it form another habit. The power 
that forms it must come from outside itself. That power is 
the whole personality, feelings, impulses, thought : most active 
of these is thought. 

(2) Thought. As habit is a fixed mode of response to an 
old situation, so thinking is a flexible, tentative response to 
a new situation, having as its purpose the discovery and 
selection of the best response. Having found this response, 
the organism generally turns it into a habit, and leaves 
thought free to attack another problem. Thought is, in terms 
of Thorndike's analysis of learning, the action of the prin- 
ciple of multiple response, under the guidance of a ' set :' it 
is constantly trying to put things together in a new way, look- 
ing for new relations, and in this effort, makes use of its 
previous acquisitions, habits, memories, established associa- 
tions, as material. No doubt thinking is much more than 
this, but it is at least this, and we must carefully distinguish 
between thought, which is active, tentative, flexible, directed 
toward the new, and habit, which is unprogressive, stereo- 
typed, a mere deposit of the past — though none the less im- 
portant for that. Thought may abdicate to habit, and in 
great measure does in most adults — perhaps completely in 
some — but thought is not habit, though it is such stuff as 
habits are made of. There are no habits of thought, strictly 
speaking : what are so-called are habits that condition thought 
by barring its progress in some directions, and consequently 
directing it another way; and also habits which constitute 
the material with which thought works. 

(3) Functions. "Let us use the term 'Mental Function' 
for any group of connections, or for any feature of any group 
of connections, or indeed for any segment or feature of 
behavior, which any competent student has chosen or may 
in the future choose to study, as a part of the total which 
we call a man's intellect, character, skill, and temperament. 
By so catholic a definition we shall have a convenient term 
to mean any learnable thing in man, the psychology of whose 
learning anybody has investigated." (26, p. 57.) Such a prag- 
matic use of the term is of course perfectly legitimate, but we 
shall want to know more definitely whether a function as 
such has an organic unity, a nucleus in some innate char- 
acter and a capacity for independent growth, or whether it 
is a mere ' segment of behavior ' chosen more or less arbi- 
trarily, for convenience of study. In the former case we 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 369 

have a great group of little faculties in the mind: in the 
latter case the mind would be from one point of view an 
aggregate of atoms; from another point of view, a unit. 
If functions are faculties, we should expect much transfer 
in a small field, but no transfer to other functions : if they 
are not, then possibility of transfer should be as wide as the 
mind itself, and the immediate spread of training should be 
practically nil. Thorndike seems to lean to the latter view, 
but occasional remarks by him and others of his school sug- 
gest a tendency to regard functions as faculties. For example, 
Ruger asks : " Is there a single function for ' transforma- 
tions in three dimensions,' or are there numerous special 
functions?" (23, p. 26.) Thorndike and Woodworth say (27, 
p. 248) " the function attention, for instance, is really a vast 
group of functions " : from which but one inference is pos- 
sible, that there are as many " attentions " as there are other 
functions, and that each " attention " is attached exclusively 
to one of these functions, since no function can act without 
attention. This leaves us in doubt as to Thorndike's posi- 
tion. But considered on its merits, the second view proposed, 
denying to " functions " any independent, innate origin, seems 
the preferable. On this hypothesis, a function is to be re- 
garded as a group of habits and a body of knowledge which 
have a certain unity from serving the accomplishment of 
one general purpose. It centers, not round an internal, psychic 
nucleus of some small special ability, but round the external 
nucleus of an end to be attained. It may, however, acquire 
a unity and an independent existence much resembling that 
once attributed to a " faculty," through becoming formed 
into a constellation or complex. Thus " mathematical ability," 
if the study is pursued for a long time and without care to 
relate it to the rest of life, may be organized into a separate 
complex, dissociated from everything else — it becomes a 
" water-tight compartment." 

One important conclusion partly follows from, partly sup- 
ports, this hypothesis. It is this : within the field of pure 
intellect, there are no special abilities. So far as power of 
thought is concerned, any individual is equally well equipped 
for mathematics, philosophy, or fiction-writing: the Anlagen 
which determine anyone's special abilities and interests are 
all extra-intellectual — emotional characteristics, memory-type, 
motor control, and environment are among the most powerful 
determining factors. This conclusion rests mainly on physio- 
logical and genetic grounds. Physiologically, uniformity of 
intellectual power within the individual is to be assumed for 
the same reason that we assumed uniformity of memorial 



370 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

ability. As memory has for its basis the power of the neurones 
to resist impressions, so thought has for its basis the con- 
ductivity of the nerve-fibers in the brain. The better one's 
nerve-fibers conduct, the more fertile will his mind be in 
new combinations — or ideas — and the more often will he be 
able to hit on a good idea. There is no reason to suppose 
that this conductivity varies in different parts of the brain, 
while the fact that in thought we can summon what little 
we do know in uncongenial fields, and use it as readily on 
occasion as we can use knowledge from our favorite fields, 
indicates that the brain is an equally efficient conductor in 
all its parts. Genetically, it is not easy to see how specializa- 
tions in the field of thought should occur. We can easily 
understand sight-centers, auditory centers, speech-centers, 
hand-and-arm centers ; but how explain mathematics-centers 
and philosophy-centers : or, taking smaller " functions," cen- 
ters for puzzle-solving, and centers for judging rectangles 
of approximately a given area? The facts of learning are 
much more easily explained without supposing such " centers." 
This explains in a new way the correlations which Hart and 
Spearman have pointed out, and for which they have postu- 
lated a " general factor." Granted that different parts of the 
brain are equally efficient in the quality on which intelligence 
depends, they will be correlations without the help of an 
ubiquitous " general factor." 

(4) Is attention one function, or a group of functions If 
our contention concerning other functions is granted, then 
attention must be one function, for it is the prerequisite of 
every activity, and if it does not attach, in separate fragments, 
to separate innate faculty-like functions, it must attach instead 
to mental activity in general : that is, it must function as one. 
Two other considerations support this view, even if we sup- 
posed the innate origin which we have just denied, of separate 
" mental functions." (a) Attention can be concentrated. If 
there were a great variety of separate " attentions," the amount 
of attention available for any one function would be strictly 
limited, and show very little variation, (b) Supposing atten- 
tion not to be one, the " attentions " belonging to two unrelated 
functions could work simultaneously without interference in 
consciousness : the more remote from each other the two 
functions were, the less would they interfere. Instead of 
that, we find that we can attend at one instant only to so 
much material and of such a sort that it can be contemplated 
as a unit: the more unrelated an idea that tries to crowd in, 
the more distracting its influence. 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 371 

The Things That Transfer 

I. Knowledge and Ideas. The distinction in meaning be- 
tween " knowledge " and " ideas " may be caught by comparing 
the phrases " a learned man " and " a man of ideas." Taking 
the suggestion from these phrases, we may define knowledge 
as what one learns from others ; and ideas as what he works 
out for himself. By this definition, what were ideas to Plato 
or Kant, become merely knowledge to me, unless I reconvert 
them into ideas by working them out for myself. The dis- 
tinction is vital, for what we retain as knowledge is never 
more than what appears on the surface — we can reproduce it 
all — while what we possess as ideas have behind them the 
richness of the thought which went into them — the least part 
of an idea appears on the surface. Consequently, while a 
bit of knowledge and an idea may look exactly alike, they 
are vastly different. To Kant, the Critique of Pure Reason 
represented the fruit of years of thought: a sentence of it 
might stand for whole volumes. To us, if we only read it 
to find out what he said, it will be little more than, in Ham- 
let's phrase, " words, words, words." We can only win 
from it something of the significance it had for Kant, by 
getting into sympathy with his point of view, putting our- 
selves into his place, trying to understand why he held this 
or that position, and thinking his thoughts over after him. 
This is the creative reading which Emerson urges upon us. 
It by no means involves even temporary assent to the doc- 
trines of the author whom we happen to be reading, but it 
does involve recognizing that he was human ' of like thoughts 
with ourselves,' and reading his work sympathetically, as the 
honest effort of a human mind to express the thoughts that 
came to it. 

Both knowledge and ideas are capable of transfer: but 
knowledge can never transfer of itself. It must first be 
worked up into ideas — that is, adapted, re-formed and re- 
organized, for the purpose at hand. We see this impotence 
of mere knowledge, everywhere: we all know boys whose 
knowledge of physics coexists with methods in their every- 
day mechanics that go back to the cave-men ; girls to whom 
chemistry and cooking have no relation. I know one excel- 
lent teacher of geometry who on attempting a little amateur 
carpentry never thought of using the principle of the right 
triangle to get the length of his rafters and the proper bevel 
of their ends ; but set two timbers up on the sills at what 
seemed an acceptable pitch, got someone to help hold them, 
and marked with a pencil where they crossed. A little 



372 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

thought might have suggested from his knowledge of geom- 
etry the principle which trained mechanics, though themselves 
ignorant of geometry, have been taught to use: but human 
nature seems prone to make the hands save the head, instead 
of making the head save the hands. Anything to get out of 
thinking. 

This points to the true nature of the gap between theory 
and practice, and how it is to be bridged. Theory is a state- 
ment of the relations between one bit of experience and an- 
other: and as soon as it loses touch with the experience out 
of which it grew, it becomes meaningless. The " mere 
theorist " is not even a theorist : he is only a depository of 
theories worked out by others, which to him are merely 
knowledge. But he has this advantage over the " practical 
man " who knows no theory : let him once wake up to the 
fact that his knowledge has meaning when brought into 
contact with life, and he has the store of knowledge already 
to be worked over into ideas — into power. This is a partial 
justification of the school, for giving so much of its time 
to teach theories which can find little or no contact with 
the pupil's present experience. The pupil is not necessarily 
the worse off for possessing knowledge which does not relate 
to his present experience: while he is far better equipped 
for the future time when his knowledge will become sig- 
nificant, and if he is alert, the very possession of knowledge 
which he cannot relate up to life, will of itself challenge 
and enrich the assimilation of his school-learning to experi- 
ence. But this consideration in no way justifies the school 
in accentuating the break between theory and life. We may 
frankly recognize that much of the subject-matter of our 
school studies — even history and geography — will not reach 
its highest significance to the pupil until years afterward, and 
that we need not worry over the fact: but we must make 
so much of it as we can relate to his life, or, if he is an 
average boy, the idea will never dawn on him that school- 
learning can be applied to every-day problems. Learning 
remains to him a thing apart. 

II. Attitudes and Ideals. The Aufgabe and the Ein- 
stellung, the controlling factors in all thought, are for that 
very reason, controlling factors in all transfer. In studies 
of learning, it is usual to bracket the two as parts of one 
process, and then focus attention mainly on the Einstellung — 
quite naturally, because only through the Einstellung does 
the Aufgabe get results. But in a study of transfer, the dis- 
tinction between the Aufgabe or goal-idea, and the Ein- 
stellung or " set," must be kept clear. 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 373 

(a) The " set." The set is the bondservant of the goal- 
idea, the adjustment which the organism makes in obedience 
to that idea. Any such adjustment is to be counted efficient 
only in proportion as it gets the results called for by the 
goal-idea. But any given " set," if often enough assumed, can 
become habitual, and so lose its intimate dependence on the 
goal-idea. Then we have something that looks very much 
like a formal habit. As in the humbler realm of activity, 
conscious, deliberate reaction to a new stimulus turns into 
habitual, automatic reaction to the stimulus after it has been 
often repeated: so in the realm of purposes and adjustments 
to them, the purpose at first determines the adjustment, but 
at last, if we often meet the same situation with the same 
purpose, the adjustment becomes automatic, and may even 
conflict with the purpose, while it will certainly persist with- 
out the help of the purpose. A page from my own experi- 
ence, which many another language-student in our country 
can match, will serve to illustrate. In college, I studied my 
texts in foreign languages primarily for the purpose of being 
ready for translation in class. As I gained some familiarity 
with the languages studied, I acquired the habit of reading 
merely to make sure that I could translate when called upon, 
only passages or words that required working out or looking 
up, attracted my attention. Passages that contained no diffi- 
culties were passed by with a sort of subconscious comment, 
"yes, I can do that;" and without thought of the subject- 
matter. The result is that since my college days, now that 
I read for subject-matter, I find it almost impossible to get 
any connected idea of the content of a book in a foreign 
language until the second reading, and often the easier the 
text, the less I get. I acquired in college what Thorndike 
calls a " habit of neglect " — learning to neglect the subject- 
matter, because class-work made no call for it — and the habit 
has stubbornly persisted in spite of constant effort to break 
it up. 

These crystallized sets, which have declared their inde- 
pendence of the parent goal-ideas, are the most important 
of the so-called " habits of thought." A set, whether become 
habitual or not, forms during the period of its dominance, 
the channel within which thought must flow : become habitual, 
it acts as a unvarying controller of thought in the presence 
of situations which call up the given set. A single set, or 
a small group of them, may after a period of long habitua- 
tion, so dominate the mind that thought dares not and cannot 
leap their bounds. Thus the mathematician, the historian, 
the financier, the specialist in any line, may so firmly acquire 



374 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

a set appropriate to his own line, and be so innocent of any 
other forms of thought, that he transfers this one lone set 
of his to everything that he does. More precisely, this 
habitual set often makes the man unable to see facts and 
values that lie outside the sphere of his particular work. 
There are lawyers in whose minds the statute law usurps 
the place of the moral code : and another case in point is the 
business man who thought that he had struck a death-blow 
to literary culture by arguing that knowledge of Shakespeare 
had never helped anyone to win a speculation on the stock 
exchange. 

The set transfers more readily than other kinds of habit, 
because it is attached rather to the general outline of a situa- 
tion than to its full concrete reality : thus a far wider variety 
of situations occur that are, so far as concerns the elements 
evoking the given set, identical. For example, one who 
acquires the habit of contradicting people, needs only to en- 
counter a statement of fact or opinion in conversation, and 
his habitual set is at once called up. The statements to 
which he reacts at various times may be as unlike as day 
and night, yet they are identical in form, both being asser- 
tions. Let the medium of conversation be questions, con- 
cealing the speaker's opinions, and the habitual set of the 
contentious person is helpless to act. The reaction was to the 
form of the remarks, and changing the form, we evade the 
reaction. 

(b) The goal-idea. From its very nature, the goal-idea 
cannot become habitual. It is essentially an act of will, and 
though we may habitually do a thing, we cannot habitually 
will a thing. Just so far as habit enters in, volition drops 
out : it is no longer needed. So when a set becomes habitual, 
the goal-idea to which it belonged fades out, and is very 
often lost sight of. This is a valuable labor-saving device, 
because it saves us from the necessity of thinking out our 
purposes anew .whenever we meet a situation : but it is also 
dangerous, if not carefully used. In any occupation which 
involves much routine — and most do — one is in great danger 
of making a fetish of things which were originally done for 
a purpose, but have become so fixed from constant repetition 
that they are at last done automatically, worshipped as ends 
in themselves, and may even serve to defeat the purpose which 
they should have served, but which, now lost sight of, can 
gain no respect. School discipline, hospital rules, legal pro- 
cedure, contain endless illustrations of this irrational worship 
of form due to divorcing the set from the goal-idea. 

Sets may be taught ; goal-ideas can only be evoked, brought 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 375 

to consciousness. What one wants is an expression of what 
he is; but one may not be at all clear as to his own nature, 
nor as to his own wishes. The great business of education 
is to help him find himself, to help him to understand what 
he is, and what are the best means of realizing fully the pos- 
sibilities of his own nature. One may very easily choose the 
wrong intermediate goal-ideas, and so defeat the end which 
he wishes to serve. Education, in preparing him against 
this, does in a very important sense teach him goal-ideas, but 
only, as said before, in the sense that it evokes them from his 
own nature. But school education very largely fails in prac- 
tice to do this, because it has very little thought of the indi- 
vidual, and still less of such intangible things as purposes 
and ideals. Routine and facts are its mainstay. It can and 
does, however, through the knowledge which it gives, furnish 
a broader basis from which those who have come under its 
influence can work out for themselves more surely what 
their aims are and should be ; and we must recognize that 
too much guidance here is as bad as too little. Every one 
must " work out his own salvation," or he will be the weaker 
for not having done so. 

Ideals are the chief priests in the hierarchy of goal-ideas. 
What his supreme ideals are no one can say, for they have 
their roots too deep in the nature of his being. One who 
could define his ideals could give a complete analysis of his 
own nature and character: and the unfailing curiosity of 
everyone about his own powers and his own traits of char- 
acter, his interest in what others have to say about him, is 
an index of the uncertainty with which he gauges himself. 
But if we can never attain a final statement of our ideals, 
and may even in trying to do so state the very opposite of 
the truth, yet we can sense them dimly, and feel them with 
enough certainty to work toward them. Education of the 
right sort can enable us to become more clearly aware of 
these ideals which we dimly sense: education of the wrong 
sort can blind us to them completely. But in any case, every- 
thing that we do is at bottom directed toward the realization 
of these ideals ; or was in the beginnings, before it became, 
as a habit, independent of all aims and ideals, because inde- 
pendent even of the will. 

Goal-ideas and sets alike can transfer, but the involuntary 
transfer of a habitual set is always in response to a formal, 
superficial identity between situations, which may coexist with 
a very essential difference in other respects, which makes 
the transfer mischievous. The transfer of a goal-idea is 
necessarily voluntary, through discovery of analogies between 



376 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

situations. It may be often mistaken, but the more clearly 
one understands his own aims and ideals, the more perfectly 
adapted will his transferences be. If he learns to think clearly, 
and gains an understanding of his own purposes in life, he 
is equipped to meet any situation, not necessarily in the best 
possible way, but in a better way than he otherwise would ; 
because he is able to bring his past experience, thought, and 
decisions, to bear on it. 

III. Reasoning. Reasoning always involves — and is — deal- 
ing with some kind of subject-matter, and consequently re- 
quires familiarity with the nature of the subject-matter dealt 
with, and adaptation to it. The kind of reasoning that suc- 
ceeds in mathematics, will fail in historical study. It also 
requires a considerable stock of knowledge in the given field, 
for reasoning is very much like the process of digestion — it 
cannot go on without something to digest. But beneath the 
difference in reasoning processes consequent on difference 
in subject-matter, and beneath the conditioning fact that we 
cannot reason without knowledge to base our reasoning on, 
there is an essential similarity between reasoning processes 
even in the most unrelated fields. Any extensive discussion 
of the nature of reasoning would be out of place here, but 
we must notice what is the effect of practice in reasoning, 
and when and how it may transfer. Practice may have its 
effect in three ways : ( I ) it develops the so-called " habits of 
thought " — habitual sets, and perhaps " habits of neglect of 
fatigue and discomfort " — and thus relieves the strain on the 
voluntary attention, setting it free to focus more directly, on 
the thinking process itself. (2) It may improve one's 
familiarity with his subject-matter. This is of the very first 
importance. As one can only learn by experience to recog- 
nize objects under the microscope from the pictures of them 
in Dooks, so it is only intimate acquaintance with whatever 
the mind has to consider, that enables it to grasp the signifi- 
cant points, and distinguish and ignore the insignificant. (3) 
Practice may bring one to an understanding of " how it 
is done." This is not a matter of habituation, but of grasp- 
ing the idea that the procedure employed makes a difference 
in the results. A man of sufficient genius might learn, from 
a single act of reasoning, enough to build up a whole system 
of logic — but no one has ever done it, of course. We can, 
however, supplement what we learn from first-hand experi- 
ence, with what others have learned : and our books on logic, 
our scientific induction, our mathematical deduction, enable 
us to profit by the experience worked out by scores of great 
men, living generations apart. Practice, then, is supplemented 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 377 

by what we inherit from the experience of others, to an extent 
which we wholly fail to realize, in giving us an understanding 
of method in thought. But it must be clearly recognized that 
books and instruction can only supplement and guide experi- 
ence. We learn from them of devices which would not have 
occurred to us, and we learn to look where without guidance 
we might not have thought of looking, for significant prin- 
ciples in our own procedure : but a device which we cannot 
use, a principle which we do not recognize in our own experi- 
ence, is meaningless to us. We do not learn to reason by 
studying logic, though it may help us to understand some 
facts about our reasoning. 

Now the question is : How far can practice in reasoning 
transfer? Taking in order the three main effects of practice 
just noticed : (2) The " habits of thought " may transfer invol- 
untarily, wherever situations occur that are formally enough 
like those on which they were formed, to call them into action ; 
or they may be voluntarily transferred and adapted, because 
found useful. Thus one who has trained himself to think 
in mathematics, in philosophy, and in biology, deliberately 
transferring his acquired habits, has in consequence developed 
habits flexible enough — or rather, perhaps, generic enough — 
to apply with a great saving of effort to any new field. But 
if the thinking in all three lines is conducted with no thought 
of relating the processes, we have " water-tight compartments " 
again. If, taking the third alternative, one tries to transfer 
his habits unchanged, he fails in yet another way. Pascal puts 
very clearly how this works in his own favorite subject: 
" Geometers never see what is before their eyes. They are 
brought up among the principles of science, clear and tangible 
every one ; and all the arguments they employ have been care- 
fully tested beforehand. Hence they are puzzled when they 
have to deal with evidence of a different kind. Here the 
points are almost imperceptible; they are not so much seen 
as felt ; a man will hardly be got to notice them at all, if he 
does not do so naturally. They are so numerous and delicate 
that the very nicest judgment is needed to seize them and 
draw the right conclusions : for they cannot be set down in 
order, like the propositions of mathematics. The mind must 
take them in at a glance, rather than by any conscious process ; 
geometers only make themselves ridiculous when they insist 
on applying their axioms and definitions to matters incapable 
of such handling. Not but what the mind does reason about 
them after a silent, instinctive fashion of its own, beyond the 
power of most to grasp, and of any to explain." 

(2) Familiarity with subject-matter is of course useful only 



378 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

so far as the subject-matter itself enters into the work of 
other fields. But we very readily overlook even the extent 
to which the subject-matter applies: the self-same fact looks 
very different in school from the way it looks in a business 
office; and very different at church on Sunday than at work 
on Monday — and we do not recognize its identity when it 
puts on a different dress. Consequently we lose valuable 
transfer-possibilities, learning useful facts only to forget them 
again, because we did not learn them well enough to recognize 
them in a different setting. 

(3) Far the greater part of transfer-possibilities in reason- 
ing, come under the heading of experience in methods. Even 
transfer of habits, and of the use of subject-matter, must be 
presided over by this understanding of the basic principles 
of thought, to get the best results. By this understanding 
of the basic principles of thought, I do not mean the kind of 
conscious evaluation that could be worked up into a book 
on logic; but rather the instinctive grasp — analogous in a 
way to vigor of conscience in morals — on which the conscious 
evaluation of principles must rest, and which can exist with- 
out that conscious evaluation. No course of study can infal- 
libly evoke this instinctive grasp: any subject may do it, if 
the subject appeals sufficiently to the student. Dewey had 
this partly in mind when he said : " Any subject ... is 
intellectual, if intellectual at all, not in its fixed inner struc- 
ture, but in its function — in its power to start and direct sig- 
nificant inquiry and reflection." (7, p. 39.) At the same time, 
some subjects are far more effective than others in this re- 
spect, owing to their fixed inner structure, if they can be made 
to appeal : because they can afford the student a far wider 
variety of " significant inquiry and reflection " in a more con- 
centrated form. 

IV. Moral Judgments. The teaching of morals is the most 
baffling of all problems in education, and the few remarks that 
can be made here can scarcely hope to add much toward its 
solution: but since transfer in and into the realm of morals 
is one of the most important things that the doctrine of for- 
mal discipline has to deal with, we must face the problem, 
were it only to confess defeat. In dealing with moral educa- 
tion, one principle may be laid down as fundamental. If, 
and so far as, we can influence morals through intellectual 
training, that is, for the school, at least, the best mode of at- 
tack. This is true for several reasons. In the first place, it 
relieves the serious difficulty met in finding teachers who can 
give direct moral training. A teacher who inculcates, by 
command of the school board, moral principles which find but 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 379 

a small place in his own life, can scarcely avoid making the 
instruction seem a mockery to his pupils : yet in selecting 
teachers, it would only put a premium on hypocrisy and time- 
serving, to go into their moral qualifications more minutely 
than we now do, in demanding that they measure up to cer- 
tain broad, easily ascertainable standards. The roots of char- 
acter lie too deep to be reached by any objective tests : and 
it is so easy to " assume a virtue if you have it not," with 
sufficient verisimilitude to deceive the average man, that we 
could scarcely expect moral tests to improve the personnel 
of the teaching profession, especially since every vigorous 
character would resent them, and leave the profession by the 
shortest route, rather than submit. In the second place, there 
is always danger that direct moral teaching will become either 
so aridly intellectual that it will have no meaning in terms of 
action, in the children's minds, and may even rub the bloom of 
their youthful enthusiasms; or else so sentimental and goody- 
goody as to repel the sturdier characters, and confirm the 
others in their priggish tendencies. Again, direct moral teach- 
ing must have to do very largely with particular acts. People 
demand tangible results, and this is the easiest way to get 
them : and besides, only a rare teacher could deal with any- 
thing like moral principles, without talking over the pupils' 
heads. The result, then, of the usual moral training must 
be to develop a purely formal morality, consisting merely of 
particular habits of behavior. An extreme picture of what 
such moral training can do in an earnest, conscientious man, 
is seen in Victor Hugo's character portrait of Javert. 

If we can reach morals through the intellect, giving a firm 
basis for a sound morality, but leaving each one to work out 
his own character, we avoid all these difficulties. Everyone 
wants and needs, of course, the help of others in forming his 
character, but he naturally seeks this help personally and pri- 
vately, not through the medium of class work. Can we find 
this desired intellectual basis, to be taught in school, for the 
formation of character? In several ways, I think. First, 
through the " intellectual conscience." This roots less deeply 
in sentiment than does the moral conscience, and so is less 
liable to perversion, and easier to reach. Intellectual hon- 
esty, for example, is simply freedom from self-deception. 
Generally speaking, no one is eager to deceive himself, so 
the teacher has little trouble in enlisting the will. He needs 
only to prepare his pupils against the errors into which 
thought readily falls, and so far as they learn to think soundly, 
they will be intellectually honest. But one who is honest with 
himself is far more likely to be honest with other people, 



380 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

because he has acquired the technique of honesty — and a great 
part of the dishonesty in the world is due to sheer inability 
to tell the truth — and because honesty seems to him more a 
thing to be desired, than to one in whose mind the distinction 
between truth and falsehood is less clear. 

A second way of reaching morals through intellect has al- 
ready been foreshadowed, in the section on ideals and goal- 
ideas. The laws of morality are only means to an end : the 
realization of ideals. One who has learned to orient his in- 
tellectual aims by his ideals is the readier to guide his con- 
duct in the same way. Let him link up his moral principles 
with the rest of his life, and they will gain both in dignity 
and compelling power. Duty gets a richer meaning; con- 
science is recognized as a friend to be cherished. This ap- 
proach, then, through intellect to morals, depends on bringing 
ideals to conscious recognition, and developing the judgment, 
as a power of selecting the right means to realize ideals. 

A third means of moral influence, less distinctly intellectual, 
but a purer case of transfer, is through pre-forming moral 
judgments. We see ourselves as other see us, much more 
clearly, if we have first contemplated and judged the given 
act in someone else — even in a character of fiction. The parable 
of the ewe lamb, which the prophet Nathan used to bring 
David's crime home to him, is an illustration of this. If, 
then, through stories, children in school have a chance to 
judge coolly and without personal bias certain modes of 
behavior, those pre- formed judgments are there as a basis 
from which to judge their own behavior. The extent of the 
transfer depends on how fully they realize the identity between 
their own acts and the others on which they have passed 
judgment. 

But one caution must be added: if we substitute the 
approach to morals through the intellect, for the direct ap- 
proach, no one must infer that all reference to morals should 
be banished from the schools. It should not be made a sub- 
ject of formal instruction, because morality at its best pos- 
sesses a spontaneity and naivete which formal instruction 
tends to spoil: but on the other hand, to avoid all reference 
to it as taboo would be just as bad as the other extreme of 
lugging it in by force wherever possible. Morality is as nat- 
ural to humanity as is breathing, and one should feel as little 
constraint in speaking of the one as of the other. Any de- 
parture from spontaneity, in either direction, will throw an 
atmosphere of unreality around the whole subject, in the 
minds of most children. 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 381 

The Mechanism of Transfer 

The reader may have noticed that throughout the whole 
of our study thus far, we have emphasized the fact that under 
certain conditions, knowledge and training may transfer: it 
remains to inquire what principles determine whether or not 
this transfer will come about. These determining factors are 
two, the one functioning as the medium, the other as the 
motive power. 

I : The Law of Analogy. It is a commonplace to say that 
one cannot expect to meet any two situations that are exactly 
alike ; yet we are constantly treating situations as identical 
with other situations which we have already met, and we 
treat still more situations as sufficiently like something in our 
past experience to be met in the same way. The moral code, 
the legal code, and any kind of general rules or principles are 
only possible because of this tendency. But how and why 
do our minds come to behave in this way? It is due in the 
beginning to the fact that we perceive incompletely, and 
quickly forget even the greater part of what we perceive. 
Consequently situations that are not alike look alike to us, 
through our not noticing their points of difference. Some 
kinds of similarity, as has been noticed earlier in this paper, 
will set off habitual or instinctive tendencies to respond, with- 
out the interference of conscious volition, or even in defiance 
of it. These give us the pure " functioning of identical ele- 
ments " which has been so widely held to be the sole explana- 
tion of apparent transfer: the elements may not be objectively 
identical, but they are subjectively so. But as our observation 
becomes more accurate and our knowledge more extensive, 
we come to detect differences in situations that once looked 
alike, and where we once through ignorance treated situations 
as wholly identical, we now for convenience treat them as in 
some degree identical, though recognizing them as different. 
Thus we have the genesis of analogy, the principle which lies 
at the bottom of all thought, and without which all learning 
would be worthless, because without it we could not bring 
what we learn today to bear on the new situations which we 
have to meet tomorrow. The syllogism, that once supposed 
instrument of exact thinking and of certainty, is only a for- 
mula for reducing analogy to its lowest terms. All inference 
is transfer, and the transfer may be either of knowledge, as 
when we infer from the ratio between diameter and circum- 
ference of a circle in geometry to the ratio between 
the diameter and the circumference of the earth ; or 
it may be transfer more strictly of training, as when 



382 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

we use the principles of construction learned in geom- 
etry, in building a house. These are cases of transfer between 
what we think of as closely related fields : but what we think 
of as related fields depends very much on custom and the 
state of our knowledge. Custom cannot create relationships, 
but it can blind us to those that exist. The relation between 
biology and psychology was scarcely recognized until after the 
middle of the last century : and every new application of 
science to practical life is the discovery of a new relationship, 
obvious enough when recognized, perhaps, but long un- 
thought-of. 

All transfer, then, is accomplished through the recognition 
of similarity in difference: that is, through analogy. All ef- 
fective transfer is based on recognition of fundamental simi- 
larities, and on making correct adaptations to the accompany- 
ing differences. This requires patient, careful thinking, and 
a sound knowledge of the fields or facts which are brought 
into relationship. There are relationships everywhere: it is 
our business to find them, and also not to be deceived by 
superficial analogies. The type of thinking in philosophy, to 
take an example, is essentially the same as that used in work- 
ing out a new hypothesis from experimental studies in science : 
but few philosophers would, in attempting to transfer their 
training to the field of science, take care to notice also the 
differences, and adapt themselves to their new data ; and we 
might name scientists who have been equally unintelligent on 
their part, and made of themselves bad amateur philosophers. 
Again, " History repeats itself " — that is, Greek and Roman 
history, or any other, as well as our own, is full of instructive 
analogies, but they lie deep down ; almost invariably, those 
who go to history for proofs and illustrations, fix on super- 
ficial analogies which neither prove nor illustrate. Analogy, 
then, is the one sole medium of thought and of transfer, but 
analogy may go wrong: we have yet to speak of the power 
through whose action analogy is made to go right. 

II : The Constructive Imagination. When one turns from 
action and perception to thought, he retires to a world of his 
own, of images and concepts — he commits a sort of retreat 
from reality. The value of this human ability to substitute 
thinking — manipulation of concepts and images — for man- 
ipulation of things, cannot be overestimated ; but it brings us 
to a halt before the paradox which it involves. To think, we 
must turn away from objective reality: to discover truth, 
either new or old, by our thinking, we must keep in constant 
and continuous touch with objective reality. One whose 
thought retreats from reality and stays in its retreat, may 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 383 

become a dialectician, a clever juggler of words and concepts, 
but he never will become a fruitful thinker even in a small 
way. All unquestioning acceptance of authority ,and reason- 
ing from it, no matter how true the authority may be, com- 
mits this error ; for such reasoning is not based on life, and 
consequently the reasoner himself cannot properly understand 
what either he or his authority says. It is always true that 
any great thinker's avowed followers are his worst enemies. 

To correct this tendency of thought to become unreal, is the 
function of the imagination, which I define as the power of 
mind that brings thought into rapport with reality. Its one 
dominant characteristic is unswerving fidelity to essential 
truth: it leaps straight to the significance of what it contem- 
plates ; it catches the spirit of facts and events. Ribot, though 
his treatment of the imagination differs in many respects from 
that suggested here, notes clearly the principle underlying this. 
He says of the imagination : " It reveals a power superior to 
the conscious individual, strange to him although acting 
through him : a state which many inventors have expressed in 
the words, ' I counted for nothing in that,' " (20, p. 52). And 
again, " the moment of inspiration is ruled by a perfect and 
spontaneous unity : its impersonality approaches that of the 
forces of nature," (20, p. 86). Ribot is speaking rather of the 
moment of inspiration in genius : but the same experience 
comes to all of us, but on a smaller scale, and often unnoticed, 
because taken for granted. We turn to this impersonal inspi- 
ration for truth, because the unconscious never lies : if it did, 
we should have what Plato calls " the lie in the soul." If we 
enlist the unconscious in our thinking, and preserve unper- 
verted our ability to read its deliveries, we have truth in our 
grasp. 

To make good our definition of imagination, we must keep 
the distinction made by Coleridge between imagination and 
fancy. Fancy is of two kinds : the first kind is simply imagina- 
tion at play, and produces in literature such works as the 
" Arabian Nights " ; while in dealing with the outside world 
it may be credited with the creation of caricatures, fantastic 
designs and structures made for amusement's sake, and our 
various games. Unlike imagination proper, it is not serious 
in what it does : and it never forgets the fact. The other kind 
of fancy results from an attempt to eke out a small bit of 
imagination by conscious effort, and make it larger: from 
it flow the group of faults in literature which Ruskin called 
" the pathetic fallacy " ; and in science and philosophy the 
fault of which amateur and professional students alike are 
often guilty, of twisting facts to fit theories. We notice that 



384 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

fancy is not a separate power of mind, but is only either 
adulterated imagination, or imagination in sportive mood. 
Only to avoid confusion is it desirable to confine the term 
imagination to those uses of the faculty which are both seri- 
ous and sincere. 

The imagination is the only power through which new 
truth, and true analogies, can be discovered. It required a 
sustained effort of the imagination to give Darwin's data 
sufficient reality in his mind to suggest the conclusions in 
the " Origin of Species " : it required a no less real, though 
smaller effort of the imagination to effect a right transfer 
of knowledge from geometry to house-building, or motor 
habits from baseball to tennis. Without imagination there 
may be transfer, but only by accident will it be advantageous. 
Imagination is the eye of the mind : without it, we proceed 
blindly. To use another figure, it works with our knowledge 
like Ezekiel preaching to the dry bones in the desert, when 
in response to his preaching the bones came together, were 
clothed with flesh, and became men once more. 

The imagination is not subject to the will: we cannot com- 
mand our moments of inspiration, be they great or small ; 
but we can do so indirectly, by fulfilling certain conditions 
without which these insights will not come, and then waiting. 
The first of these conditions is that we saturate ourselves 
as far as our situation allows, with the kind of knowledge 
concerning which we are seeking insights ; not only because 
we need the knowledge as material, but because we need the 
assurance of our own sincerity. The second condition is 
that we submit to the impersonality which we have already 
noticed as a trait of imagination. Unless we are willing to 
follow the truth where it leads, instead of coercing it to lead 
where we wish to go, the insights which do come will be 
lost on us. A third condition is a variant of the second : we 
must not try to strait- jacket our thinking into conventional 
forms. Forms, though useful, are dead, and moulded on 
the old. Thought will not always fit the mould, and must 
be free to take new forms. 

To sum up briefly: all learning from experience, all think- 
ing, all inference, is transfer: there are only differences in 
degree. Knowledge and habits may function as identical ele- 
ments — transfer in a sort of reflex way — or they may be 
deliberately transferred, applied, through the discovery by 
intelligence of analogies, and adaptation to new uses. Anal- 
ogy is the one and only medium of such transfer: imagina- 
tion is the power through which true analogies are to be 
found, and advantageous transfers effected. 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 385 

Practical 

It is commonly supposed that the doctrine of formal disci- 
pline has much to do with the selection of school subjects, 
and little to do with methods of teaching. Certainly many 
a pedagogical sin has been committed in its name, in the last 
half-century : many a fruitful reform has been opposed, many 
a school subject has been maintained in an unfruitful form, 
lest " disciplinary values " be lost. But if we take Locke's 
position as representative for the doctrine of formal dis- 
cipline, these pedagogical sins are to be regarded as per- 
versions grafted onto the doctrine by those who misunder- 
stood it, by those who had a genuine respect and enthusiasm 
for culture, but were unable to express more correctly its 
educational basis ; and by those, far less numerous, who had 
" axes to grind," and used the first instrument that came 
handy. To increase the confusion, other perversions have 
been mistakenly attributed to the adherents of the doctrine, 
by their opponents in controversy. If these perversions are 
taken as representative of the doctrine of formal discipline. 
then the trend of this paper is away from that doctrine; but 
if we take the positions of Montaigne, Locke, Herder, as 
representative, then the theories here advanced are in direct 
line of descent. 

Passing to the practical suggestions that follow from the 
theories of this paper, they fall into two groups : those having 
to do with the curriculum, and those having to do with 
methods of teaching: 

I. Principles of teaching. If what we teach is to have 
any transfer-value — which is almost equivalent to saying, if 
it is to have any practical value — for the average student, the 
transfer should be half-made in school. To make the trans- 
fer complete is to defeat the purpose of the school, which is 
to present experience in concentrated form, ready to be 
expanded and applied in later life: not to make any transfer 
at all in the school, results in blinding the pupils to the possi- 
bility of transfer — in closing their minds to the idea that 
theories and knowledge learned in school have any bearing 
on every-day life. The school-subjects, then, should, as 
Dewey urged, be related to life. Pupils in school must learn 
many things which cannot be based on their present experi- 
ence, but a basis in their present experience should be sought 
wherever possible. A student who has analyzed a bit of his 
own thinking, will begin to see what logic is all about: one 
who has studied the growth of plants in his garden, or in 
the woods, is ready to understand botany. We cannot, as 
Plato imagined, dispense with the stars and yet study astron- 



386 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

omy. This relating of subjects to life is not to be secured 
merely by getting out text-books whose problems and dis- 
cussions rest on the life of the immediate neighborhood. 
These will help, but a child can quite easily fail to recognize 
his own father's farm when he finds it in a text-book, as 
many of our teachers handle a text-book. The farm-wagon 
will look like Hector's chariot, after it has gone through 
the mill of the five formal steps. If the teacher is to relate 
to life the knowledge which he imparts to his pupils, it 
must be related to life in his own mind. A teacher of 
Shakespeare who is himself ignorant of and uninterested 
in human nature, may produce a few philologists or rhetori- 
cians, but he will never make literature a force in the thought 
and life of his pupils, which is certainly the sole purpose of 
teaching literature in the high school. A teacher of physics 
who would make his pupils more intelligent and efficient in 
every-day affairs, must himself be awake to the countless 
illustrations and applications to be encountered everywhere, 
of the knowledge which he has to teach. We can only teach 
what we know: if we would teach anyone the uses of the 
knowledge which we have to impart, we must understand 
those uses, ourselves. 

Since the two great media of transfer are intelligence and 
imagination, formalism in education is fatal to transfer. 
Formalism deadens both intelligence and imagination. In- 
stead of encouraging the mind to use all the resources at 
its command in dealing with material both new and old, it 
insists that thought shall follow only certain prescribed chan- 
nels, in a certain prescribed way. This ignores the fact that 
the best thinking is based on the richest variety of spon- 
taneous suggestions, and the best mind is most fertile in 
ideas. Thought must have forms, to keep it from straying 
aimlessly, but these forms exist only for the sake of thought, 
and it should be free to remake them as it goes along. To 
condemn a student's work as " wrong " because it is not 
cast in what the teacher considers the orthodox forms, is 
utterly unpedagogical. Formlessness is to be condemned, but 
so long as the student's work is systematic, the forms which 
he uses may be judged as well or ill-aadpted to his work, 
and criticized accordingly, but they cannot properly be called 
simply " right " or " wrong." Where a superintendent com- 
mands his principals and supervisors, the principals and 
supervisors command the teachers, and the teachers obediently 
command the pupils, that every piece of work must be done 
in just one minutely prescribed way and no other: there 
we have the last word in unreality. It makes a fine machine 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 387 

for exhibition purposes, enables the superintendent to make 
a beautifully systematized report, and satisfies a certain ideal 
of mechanical efficiency — but what of the children? Accus- 
tomed only to strict obedience, not permitted to follow out 
their own intellectual tendencies, carefully guarded against 
the chance to meet intellectual difficulties at first hand — lest 
they meet them in a way which the teacher disapproves — 
they are less able to think independently than if they had never 
been to school ; and one who does not think independently, 
does not think at all. And no thinking, no transfer. The 
arithmetic learned in school will not be used more than abso- 
lute necessity compels; the history will have no influence 
whatever on the child as a future citizen ; the hygiene course 
will not lead him to care more intelligently for sanitary con- 
ditions at home. 

The effect of formalism on the imagination is even more 
serious. Imagination is the most elusive function of con- 
sciousness, and only perfect sincerity can induce it to speak, 
or enable us to hear correctly when it does speak. Formalism 
attempts to force into artificial and arbitrary channels the 
one function whose very nature is spontaneity — and imagina- 
tion will not be coerced. It is well known that children who 
have been taught to draw, with rule and compass, as it were, 
in the Kindergarten, show much less artistic merit in their 
drawings than children of the same age who have not had 
such training. Any teacher who has tried to make English, 
or Latin, or geometry, or even botany, live in his pupils' 
minds, must have been oppressed by the utter inability of 
their imaginations after eight or nine years of schooling, to 
seize the meaning of a fact presented in the school-room. The 
imagination can be touched even then ; many a live teacher 
succeeds in touching it, by making forms only ancillary, and 
by keeping fresh his own realization of the meaning of what 
he is teaching: but when a mind has been eingestellt against 
any hint of imagination in school work for years, it is no 
easy matter to break through the Einstellung, and the slightest 
provocation will restore it to dominance. 

Vitality is not the only need in school work: it should also 
be difficult. This fact demands emphasis because it is a popu- 
lar fallacy that work to be " interesting " must be sugar- 
coated, made easy, that the disagreeable must be tabooed : 
and perhaps some readers might imply that this plea for 
imagination in teaching involves the same thing. Not at all. 
One who has in his school career never done anything dis- 
agreeable, who has never had to study until he has gained 
his " second breath," has missed one of the most valuable 



388 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

results of an education. All the studies of the learning 
process, as well as universal experience, prove that it is 
hard and intense work that educates. But there are abundant 
difficulties in the nature of any subject, without arbitrarily 
imposing others ; and these natural difficulties have the merit 
of stimulating thought and stirring imagination, while diffi- 
culties which the student feels to be arbitrarily imposed, are 
deadening, and tend to make most of the class feel that 
thinking is not an important part of education, while they 
repel the sturdier minds, and compel at best but a sullen 
acquiescence. Difficulties which are attacked unwillingly, 
under compulsion, only make the student more dependent 
on his taskmaster: he tends to lose all ability to set himself 
tasks and carry them out on his own initiative. But adoles- 
cents — as, indeed, most human beings — enjoy facing difficul- 
ties that are felt to be worth while, and mastering them. 
In such difficulties alone is disciplinary value to be found. 
For this reason, I might pause to add, studies should be 
prescribed only as a last resort. One works better at a study 
which he has chosen of his own free will. We must, appar- 
ently, in the present state of secondary education, have a 
large amount of prescription, but it should be recognized for 
what it is — a necessary evil — and mitigated in every way 
possible. 

II. The Curriculum. Since transfer is possible, and, given 
sensible teaching, is assured: therefore we may lay it down 
as a first principle in deciding on educational values, that 
those subjects whose content is of the widest applicability, 
are the first to be chosen, where general education is the 
aim. Also, even in strictly vocational training, the wider 
applicability of the principles underlying the rules of the 
trade, should be brought to notice wherever possible. This 
gives a better control over the rules of the trade itself, has a 
great cultural value as a stimulus to thought, and most im- 
portant of all, perhaps, gives the one so educated greater 
adaptability. In the rapidly changing industrial conditions 
of the time, no one can foresee with certainty the future of 
any trade. New inventions, new methods, may make one's 
training an unsalable article when he has barely finished his 
apprenticeship ; and the more highly specialized his skill, 
the less adaptable will he be to new conditions, unless he has 
also kept open avenues of transfer of training, through basing 
his knowledge and training on general principles, and avoid- 
ing the formation of a too rigid set. 

It follows from this that pure science is preferable to 
applied science. Really, pure science should in its teaching 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 389 

methods approximate to applied science, since, as said before, 
the transfer from theory to practice should be half-made in 
school. But the point of view should be that of pure science, 
which concerns itself about general principles, and the rela- 
tions between them : not that of applied science, which only 
lays down rules for the performance of certain acts, and cares 
not at all why those rules hold good. An empirical formula 
is a block of offense to pure mathematics ; to applied mathe- 
matics, one formula is as good as another, if it works. In 
teaching pure science, the pupil will best understand these 
general principles if he has arrived at some of them by his 
own observation : therefore the first approach to a science 
should be inductive, free from any special apparatus, and 
innocent of technical terminology. The average boy would 
stand in awe of a dollar watch if he saw it labelled a chron- 
ometer, in a laboratory. The first two or three weeks of a 
physics course, for example, should be done without either 
text-books or laboratory ; the students should simply be set 
to studying intently the behavior of familiar things, until they 
had firmly grasped a few fundamental principles. It would 
be even better to give this preliminary work, or some of it, 
at least, in the last week or two of the year preceding the 
physics course itself, so as to give the pupils something to 
think about during the summer. In this way the long vaca- 
tion, which is now very much a period of forgetting, would 
become a period of learning — of learning of the best kind. 
Given this informal introduction to the science, then the tech- 
nical names for the principles that have been observed, can 
safely be given, and the work with text-book and laboratory 
begun. To do all the work inductively would gain nothing, 
and would slow up the course intolerably ; but a week of 
inductive study at the beginning will give a basis of under- 
standing from which the pupils will be able spontaneously to 
apply their knowledge in understanding and dealing with all 
sorts of everyday problems, as fast as the knowledge is 
acquired. They have started out with a " transfer-£m.?fc/- 
lung," so to speak, and will work over their knowledge as 
they go along: without this Einstelhing, their knowledge 
remains isolated, and every bit of it that is to be used must 
be worked over anew, later. Further, this isolation develops 
a feeling of unreality which is one of the hardest of all mental 
sets to break up. 

A second determining principle in planning a curriculum, 
is that the student's course of study should contain several 
different kinds of subjects. The mind will form sets, espe- 
cially in adolescence, whether we wish it or not ; the school 



390 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

should see to it that a sufficient number and variety of sets 
should be formed, so that the student is reasonably well- 
equipped on other sides of his nature, as well as on the side 
that his future vocation will develop. This is needed not 
only for his own personal good, but also because every man 
is a citizen and a member of society, as well as a workman. 
He is a layman with respect to every vocation but one, and 
on the intelligent interest of the layman depends practically 
all progress in every line. Without the pressure of that 
intelligent interest upon them, professionals in any line be- 
come stereotyped, averse to change, and resist improvements 
that the thoughtful members of their body suggest. 

A third principle is that every one's course of study should 
be so chosen that the different subjects will supplement each 
other in the kind of work provided. The student should be 
allowed and induced to do his own choosing, so far as prac- 
ticable, but in any case, the choice should heed this principle. 
Every subject has its characteristic effect on the mind, both 
for good and bad. The effect of geometry as put in the 
passage from Pascal quoted above, will serve as an example. 
The course of study should be planned to make these char- 
acteristic effects balance each other. Moreover, every subject 
makes some demand on powers which, because that demand 
in the given subject is slight and scattered, it fails to develop 
adequately. Thus, to take an example from advanced study, 
biology demands, to evaluate its data, precisely the kind of 
thinking which is the characteristic feature of philosophical 
study, and it has also to deal at times with conceptions which 
are central in philosophy. But in the study of biology, this kind 
of thinking and these conceptions play so small a part, quanti- 
tatively speaking, that the biologist acquires little familiarity 
with them, in his study, and often betrays a surprising inca- 
pacity when he has to deal with them ; and with it sometimes 
an equally surprising blindness to his own incapacity. An in- 
telligent study of philosophy — which must also be a sympa- 
thetic, interested study of it — would at the same time soften 
the arrogance and correct the incapacity. The same thing 
applies, mutatis mutandis, to every study. Every specialist, 
from philosopher to classicist, is likely to be arrogant in his 
claims, and to be handicapped in his own line through lack 
of some kind of knowledge and training which is needed, but 
not adequately provided, in specialized study. 

Finally, the school should aim to teach a few things well 
and thoroughly to each student, not to give a scattering 
knowledge of a great variety of subjects. Not content, but 
assimilable content, is what counts in education, and before 



THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 391 

knowledge can be assimilated, there must be present in the 
mind a coherent body of related knowledge. A well and 
broadly-educated adult can assimilate almost any bit of 
knowledge in almost any form, with some success ; but an 
adolescent, whose education is only beginning, must have 
enough of a given study presented to develop it into coherence. 
If insufficient time is given to the study, nothing is likely to 
be gained from it but a chaos of mere memorized facts, use- 
less, because unassimilated. Given a nucleus of three or 
four principal studies, little excursions into other lines are 
valuable as means of starting centers of apperception, some 
of which, at least, may be followed up independently later ; 
and as a means of helping the pupils to see how wide and 
rich the life of the world is. But the work should not all 
be little excursions, and the excursions themselves should be 
given by methods less formal than the studies which are 
especially stressed : set study should fall into the background, 
there should even be no final grades, no academic ranking, 
on such work. While such work may have immense poten- 
tial value, it has no present academic value of the kind which 
credits should represent, and we only deceive ourselves by 
pretending that it has. Besides, " working for marks " al- 
ways diminishes spontaneity, and makes teacher and pupil 
in a sense natural antagonists : we should welcome the oppor- 
tunity to abolish marks wherever possible. Thus academic 
ethics and pedagogic efficiency demand the same thing. 

But returning to the point that the students' course should 
consist mainly in intensive and thorough study of a few 
subjects: another reason for this is that the preliminary stages 
of any study are almost purely memory-work, and to get any 
disciplinary value, or any cultural value, the work must be 
carried beyond that stage, to the point of a certain degree 
of mastery. Anyone would recognize that one who has 
learned to play the piano well is better trained musically than 
one who has spread his time over the study of twenty or 
thirty instruments, can play the scale on all, but can do 
nothing else on any. The latter has spent all his time on 
elementary details of technique : the former has been able 
to live and study on planes of musical significance of which 
the other has no knowledge. We recognize this in music, but 
in school-study it is overlooked. Even on the well-established 
principle of the hierarchy of habits, the second year of a 
subject should have more cultural value than the first; the 
third than the second. It should be recognized, and never 
forgotten, that higher mental habits are more generic, are 
more readily transferable, than lower; and that the fact of 



392 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMAL DISCIPLINE 

having worked through all or nearly all the stages of the 
learning process in any one subject, furnishes a basis of 
guidance in attacking any subject, which basis is often suf- 
ficient to cut years off the time required for a new subject. 

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